Hailee Yoshizaki-Gibbons

Within the dominant U.S. cultural imagination, dementia care is often constructed as a significant physical, mental, emotional, and financial burden, with a huge cost to individuals, families, and society. This cultural anxiety positions dementia as a signifier of dependence, helplessness, frailty, and loss. However, feminist disability studies offers a way to approach dementia and care as relational, collective, and political. Drawing on nine months of ethnographic research in the dementia unit of a nursing home, I illustrate how dementia care is a site of collectivity, resistance, and activism in a context of exploitation, control, and oppression. I uncover how institutionalized old women with dementia and immigrant women of color care workers navigate strict institutional routines, pressures of time management, and tightly controlled, pre-determined care tasks and withstand these forces by making time for and giving time to one another, continuously (re)building relationships, and investing in collective care that emphasizes interdependence.

Presented with Five Undergraduate Students: August Bales, McKayla Carpenter, Victoria Freeman, Madigan Nolan, and Lina Ross Under neoliberal capitalism, students are socialized to understand grades as a marker of success and (hyper)productivity. This leads to them disproportionately focusing on earning high grades, rather than learning and developing as thinkers. In “Work Will Not Save Us,” Chen, Khúc, and Kim explain the importance of refusing work in higher education as part of anti-capitalist politics. They outline several different ways to effectuate this refusal, and specifically, they offer the simple provocation, “Get rid of grades.” In this roundtable, a professor and students from the course “Feminist of Color Perspectives on Disability, Illness, and Health” explain how they did just that, using the radical form of assessment called “ungrading” and a more creative, flexible approach to student learning. Specifically, they discuss how they rejected the neoliberal capitalist structure of grading, embraced anti-work politics, and instead created a community centered on access, care, and healing in the classroom.

In The Bloomsbury Handbook to Ageing in Contemporary Literature and Film, edited by Sarah Falcus, Heike Hartung, Raquel Medina In 2020, the Alzheimer’s Association reported that the number of people with dementia in the United States is rapidly increasing. Currently, there are approximately 5.8 million people with dementia in the U.S., but by 2025, this number is expected to grow by 22% to 7.1 million people. Accordingly, there has also been an expansion of representations of dementia in media, particularly in film. As an age-related impairment intertwined with cultural fears of dependence, debility, loss of self, and death, dementia illuminates the ways in which aging and disability are deeply entangled in American culture and society. However, despite robust collections of scholarship that analyze disability in film and aging in film, there have been limited scholarly explorations of how representations of aging and disability intersect. Drawing from aging studies scholar Sally Chivers’ (2011) theory of “the silvering screen” and disability studies scholars Mitchell and Snyder’s (2000) theory of “narrative prothesis,” this chapter seeks to examine the ways aging and disability are culturally entangled, and how this enmeshment is reflected in film. Through an analysis of the recent film What They Had (2018), I argue that representations of dementia in film allow the viewer to situate themselves within systems of compulsory youthfulness (Gibbons, 2016) and compulsory able-bodiedness/able-mindedness (Kafer, 2013; McRuer, 2006). Like many films on dementia, What They Had relies heavily on discourses of dementia connected to loss of self, burden, tragedy, and death, thereby reflecting “social anxiety about identity, self, and meaning” (Chivers, 2011, p. xix). Ruth, the character with dementia, serves solely as a device to further the plot. Consequently, the audience is not expected to identify Ruth, thereby confirming to viewers that, compared to this old and disabled woman with dementia who ultimately ends up in a nursing home, they are healthy, youthful, and able. As a result, despite praise from critics that these films “accurately” represent dementia and dementia caregiving, these films further ableist and ageist assumptions about dementia and, more broadly, aging and disability.