café-philo at the place de la Bastille and a talk on women and disability in France

14.11.2004

This has been a busy week. I set off for Paris on Monday to attend the first café-philo hosted by Cathy Kudlick (UCDavis), Lucie Fontaine et Jean-Baptiste Nanta, authors of the guide Paris en fauteuil held at Les associés, 50 boulevard de la Bastille. There were nearly 20 of us cramped into a small corner of the cafe. The theme was: Une personne handicapée est-elle une personne diminuée ? "Is a disabled person a lesser person?"

It was a nice ambiance but it was rather noisy. We had about three vision impaired 'malvoyantes' , three of us in wheelchairs and a couple had other disabilities and friends and family members. Oh yes, there was even a journalist from a local radio station. There is at least one who came from Cathy's class at the CNAM.

It was fascinating for me as this was my first ever experience of a philosophy cafe. Jean-Baptiste lead the discussion by beginning with his thoughts on the subject. It would be logical that as a philosopher, his discussion would have a philosophical bent. I struggled to keep up as I am not familiar with that type of discourse in French. (The French have philosophy as a compulsory subject at school.) We questioned on the norm for disability, 'singularity 'vs 'difference', is legality the general principle, we spoke about the republican and that before French law, we are all (supposedly) served the "liberty, fraternity, and equality" by jurisdiction. How is that translated in reality? What is the role of the school system? Is it a political question? One spoke of the need to be an activist and another talked of the French state taking control of any initiatives by subsuming it.

Of course I may have missed an awful lot or even misunderstood some of it. When we closed the discussion at 8.30pm some of us stayed to have dinner together. It was totally an interesting evening.
I cannot say the same for the hotel. I took a room from the Internet - the Eden Magenta Hotel, 52 bis rue des Vinaigriers, 75010 PARIS. It had supposedly facilities for the disabled and internet access. However, there was a big step to get into the hotel and I couldn't quite get my chair into the bathroom in my room. It was too late at near midnight to do much about it. I tried to go to an internet cafe along the same street to check my email the next morning. Again there was a step and when I signal to the guy in the shop - he told me there was not enough space for me in an empty shop! This is the first time I've been refused access in France so blatantly and I've lived here on and off for about 14 years. I didn't insist, not a battle on which to spend my energy. When I told the taxi driver who picked me up later in the day, he said he didn't think it was legal.

Tuesday was a beautiful sunny day in Paris. I decided to go to the Pompidou center, not knowing that it was closed on a Tuesday. I wandered around it. I found a cheap Chinese/ Vietnamese restaurant where I had pho soup for 3 euros and went window shopping. There were certainly some fascinating shops and stalls, postcards, touristic items and around there. I ended up in rue Rivoli which is a very busy street with the Hotel de Ville and an enormous BHV store. I was getting tired and was glad that it was time to go to the CNAM.

Delphine Siegrist was the speaker for the group that afternoon. She is a journalist based near Lyons and is the author of a few books - Oser être femme among one of them. She started by giving us an exercise in thinking up word associations with the word "femme" (woman) chalked and encircled on the blackboard and then moving to "femme handicapée" (disabled woman). It was an interesting exercise. She gave us some background on disability history in France and how there is a slight conflict between feminism in regard to women with disabilities. ( Feminists are trying to disassociate themselves from the traditional feminine roles while women with disabilities are fighting for acceptance of being in those tradional roles: mother, wife and sexual object.) She said she got her initiation into the women and disability issue from being abroad, notably Canada and the United States. She also touched on how women with disabilities are doubly disadvantaged and the state of maternity care for women with disabilities in France. (not good). This does not give full justice to her talk but it gives a gist. One thing she mentioned is that she had difficulties in getting statistics about women with disabilities because there is not much interest in covering research about people with disabilities.

I got home to Strasbourg just before midnight. It was bitterly cold. I had a meeting with the consultant at 9 am the next morning that ANPE is sending me to help me in my search for jobs. She doesn't seem too hopeful. She suggested that I might consider going to Brussels (with the type of cv and the work I am qualified for) or Paris. She also thought I should take up French citizenship if I want a public service job. I am getting a sense of deja vu - this is what they told me in the USA - the good news is that I have already been living in France for a long time and - I could hold dual nationality. Besides I have decided to make my home in France. I have my own philosophical and ethical doubts about doing that. Am I being too scrupulous? Can one not be a citizen of the world? Would that be shirking responsibility? Are my loyalties not always with my place of birth where I spent my formative years in my youth?