The late Tobin Siebers was a pioneer of, and one of the most prominent thinkers in, the field of disability studies. His scholarship on sexual and intimate affiliations, the connections between ...structural location and coalitional politics, and the creative arts has shaped disability studies and continues to be widely cited. Sex, Identity, Aesthetics: The Work of Tobin Siebers and Disability Studies uses Siebers’ work as a launchpad for thinking about contemporary disability studies. The editors provide an overview of Siebers’ research to show how it has contributed to humanistic understandings of ability and disability along three key axes: sex, identity, and aesthetics. The first section of the book explores how disability provides a way for scholars to theorize a wider range of intimacies and relationalities, arguing that disabled people seek sexual access and revolution in ways that transgress heteronormative dictates on sexual propriety. The second part of the book works outward from Siebers’ work to looks at how disability broadens our concepts of social location and political affiliations. The final section examines how disability challenges traditional notions of artistic beauty and agency. Rather than being a strictly commemorative collection meant to mark the end of a major scholar’s career, this collection shows how Siebers’ foundational work in disability studies remains central to and continues to inspire scholars in the field today.
Through Julia Wertz's graphic memoir, The Infinite Wait and Other Stories (2012), the article explores how the narrative and formal qualities of the comics medium contribute to conversations in ...disability studies about chronic illness representation and "crip time." As comics frame time as space, graphic temporalities can expand knowledge of how illness affects one's orientation to place, normative constructions of time, and the often-oppressive patterns of living they sustain. The Infinite Wait presents an opportunity to theorize how disability in comics forcefully articulates different temporalities, plotlines beyond the curative, and defies expectations and conventions of (dis)closure. Disrupting readerly and narrative expectations of pace, time, and intrigue, The Infinite Wait performs what it means to both be a patient and be patient with the ever-shifting and everyday experiences of illness and its sociopolitical implications. Overall, comics like Wertz's claim space for oft-marginalized "mundane stories" of chronic illness.
Juxtaposing personal essay with the visual-verbal affordances of comics, intertextual collage, and the altered book, Walrath links her experiences of caregiving, Alice's dementia, and Armenian ...history to the adventures of Carroll's Wonderland, creating a sense of both dissonance and exploratory freedom to broach subjects that might typically be regarded as unapproachable: aging, coping with Alzheimer's, death, and the Armenian Genocide. Graphic medicine's central pedagogical focus on auto/ biographical comics as a tool to cultivate empathy for subjects living with illness and disability has limited critical attention to disability as a topic or ethnographic object rather than an analytical framework in its own right.3 To address this, I bring a disability studies critique to bear on the encounters Aliceheimers stages around dementia and the Armenian Genocide to show how Walrath deploys dementia as an imaginative, narrative, and ethical resource to address stories of historical violence while also asserting the agency and value of people with dementia. Recentering my approach to graphic medicine beyond the clinic (and patient/doctor dynamics) to issues of human rights and social justice, I argue for the emergent centrality of more global, intersectional, and situated engagements within future directions of graphic medicine scholarship. Historians and political scientists echo that the "forgotten history" of Armenians is barely known to international audiences due to the Turkish government's ongoing campaign to falsify its past (92).
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6.
A Temporal Stuttering Lie, Crystal Yin
Journal of literary & cultural disability studies,
02/2019, Volume:
13, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being shuttles across collapsed geographies and temporalities—from the transpacific aftereffects of the Fukushima disaster back to intergenerational histories of the ...Second World War. Against this backdrop, the narrative’s central concerns surrounding the memory of social, historical, and environmental traumas come into relief through the discourse and formal disruptions of dementia. But dementia does not merely operate as a simple metaphor for disaster and loss. Rather, Ozeki deploys dementia as a generative aesthetic, rhetorical, and epistemic resource to illustrate common challenges of remembering and writing as well as its imaginative possibilities for narrative expression. Highlighting how intertwined personal and public histories are in a global era, moments of dementia’s “temporal stuttering” throughout the novel demand readers to approach memory, communication, and relationships anew, giving pause to the politics of forgetting the past when pulled into “the now” of dementia.
This dissertation examines cultural and literary responses to dementia in narratives dealing with the personal and historical memory of trauma and violence. Rather than use dementia to signify a ...crisis of forgetting or the erasure of history, the texts in this dissertation deploy dementia as a formal and ethical resource; they offer revisionary narratives that recuperate negative discourses surrounding aging and cognitive impairment, as well as enable readers’ reflections on issues across geopolitical borders, historical contexts, and different marginalized life experiences. Bringing a disability studies analytic to the examination of the politics and narrative aesthetics of dementia, Entangled Stories argues for a nuanced understanding of how dementia operates formally and thematically in contemporary writing as a site in which the intimate and global collide.Each chapter centers on authors’ concomitant personal encounters with dementia and their explorations of the historical memory of major 20th- and 21st-century catastrophes. As such, I probe into the corresponding tropes and metaphors of dementia appearing strategically alongside the representation of those events. Chapter 1 interrogates the discourse of environmental disaster and memory loss in Ruth Ozeki’s narration of the aftermath of Fukushima. Chapter 2 examines the contemporaneous rhetorics of the “War on Alzheimer’s” and the War on Terror in Susan M. Schultz’s experimental writing. Chapter 3 focuses on two authors’ graphic renditions of dementia and traumatic history: Dana Walrath challenges dementia as a popular metaphor for political amnesia and denial in the context of the Armenian Genocide, while Stuart Campbell visualizes the interrelations of dementia and the social traumas of World War II. Chapter 4 turns to the popular fictions of Emma Healey and Jo Walton, which take up the trope of dementia’s “alternative realities” to narrate histories of gendered postwar violence and aging differently. Together, these chapters reveal how dementia operates as a heuristic for understanding the past and connecting to others differently, thus reimagining life with dementia as one of agency and social value. For readers of these texts, the subject of dementia becomes an opportunity for thinking about transformative approaches to care, community, and conceptions of what it means to be human in time and history.Traversing the intergenerational memory of injustices surrounding environmental degradation, war, occupation, and genocide, the works featured in Entangled Stories generate discussions relevant to fields of literary studies bordering trauma theory, memory studies, and postcolonialism. This dissertation’s focus on Alzheimer’s and senile dementia also emphasizes age is an important intersectional identity category, bringing disability studies into conversation with work in feminist aging studies, dementia studies, and the medical humanities. The interdisciplinary nature of this project attests to how contemporary re-imaginings of dementia go beyond personal stories of loss and the pathological discourse of plaques and tangles—they are imbricated in broader representational concerns over how to remember and respond to extreme events and political conflict. Through writing about intimate encounters with dementia, these authors grapple with the increasing fear of Alzheimer’s and dementia in the 21st century—a fear bolstered by the post-9/11 injunction to “never forget.” Indeed, one of the tensions authors negotiate is the need to protect historical memory—as a form of enlightenment and intervention to preclude future tragedies—and the necessity of holding space for personal forgetting and caring for/about the experiences of aging, dementia, and embodied difference more broadly.
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