Naming Handicap in French Legal and Educational Policy Discourse: Accessibility Governance and Deficit Framing

Abstract

This article examines how French handicap-related categories are mobilized in legal and educational policy discourse to organize access to rights, compensation, and inclusion. Rather than treating naming as a purely linguistic issue, the study approaches it as a discursive mechanism of institutional categorization and accessibility governance, understood here as the discursive and administrative processes through which institutions identify barriers, classify needs, allocate forms of support, and regulate access to rights and educational participation. The corpus combines three French laws on disability and social rights, adopted in 1957, 1975, and 2005, with ministerial and administrative texts on inclusive education and educational difference spanning 2004 to the present, with particular attention to the policy framework developed since 2013. The analysis preserves key French formulations, including handicap, handicaper, compensation, école inclusive, and besoins éducatifs spécifiques, while providing working translations for international readers. Drawing on lexical and discourse analysis, the article investigates terminological series, definitional procedures, classificatory lists, syntactic constructions, and implicit presuppositions. The analysis shows how the semantic flexibility of handicap enables its analogical use beyond its medico-legal meaning, while broader educational categories bring disability-related, linguistic, and socioeconomic disadvantages into a shared institutional framework of needs and support. These discursive operations are ambivalent: they can legitimize access to rights and compensatory measures while making deficit-oriented interpretations of linguistic and social difference institutionally available. The article argues that institutional naming shapes the conditions under which learner diversity becomes visible, actionable, and administratively governable.