Ageing Masculinities, Alzheimer’s and Dementia Narratives

Description

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. It is funded by the University of Graz and the Department of Health, Care, and Science of the Office of the Regional Government of Styria, Austria. Bringing together insights from masculinity studies and age studies, this volume focuses on the gendered and relational perspectives in cultural representations of Alzheimer’s disease. Combining a comparative and interdisciplinary approach, the authors analyse the interrelations between masculinities and representations of dementia from a wide range of cultural contexts to explore it as an intensely gendered and cultural disease. They examine memoir, film, poetry and prose fiction, and look at work from a wide range of authors, including Anne Carson, Jonathan Franzen and Philip Roth, to provide new insights into established narratives of dementia and explore the complex ways that the disease resists representation and narration and questions traditional views of selfhood and human development. In the cultural context of many western societies, Alzheimer’s disease (AD) has come to represent the dark side of longevity in the twenty-first century. While the age-old dream of a long life has become a real possibility for many people, it has simultaneously given rise to new anxieties focused on cultural fears of ‘demented’ old age. An almost inexhaustible variety of media reports, blogs and memoirs testify to today’s obsessive concern with dementia so much so that Alzheimer’s disease has become a cultural idiom for the later stages of the human life course. In expert discourse as well as in personal accounts, Alzheimer’s has produced what might be called a ‘master narrative’ or a Bildungsroman in reverse, recording the progressive un-learning of abilities and knowledges as the illness progresses. This process does not only present a major challenge to patients and caregivers, it also highlights how the illness approaches the limits of representation and narration, questioning at the same time traditional views of selfhood and human development. While Alzheimer’s affects people indiscriminately as regarding background and social status, it is also a deeply gendered affliction. Gender difference is thus an important factor in the medical and sociological research on Alzheimer’s disease, in which the statistics which pronounce women as more at risk due to difference in longevity are set against the gender imbalance of care. Whereas older women have been more in the focus of Age Studies, because of the even more punitive cultural constructions of female old age, male caregiving for spouses with Alzheimer’s disease still has to be explored in its cultural repercussions. Therefore, the focus chosen in this volume on the specifics of dementia as a disease of ageing masculinity aims at an analysis of the gender difference in care as well as specific aspects of male identity construction in the context of mental illness from the perspective of cultural gerontology. It thus addresses a blank spot in previous research. Bringing together insights from Masculinity Studies and Age Studies for the first time, this volume focuses on the gendered and relational perspectives in cultural representations of Alzheimer’s disease. The essays intend to initiate a new and more complex approach which looks at dementia as a disease affecting more than one person, invoking and challenging traditional as well as unconventional views of ageing masculinities. Combining a comparative and interdisciplinary approach with a gendered perspective, the essays in this volume engage with Alzheimer’s as a disease of ageing masculinities, drawing on representations of the disease in poetry and film, memoir, ethnographic and fictional narrative. Cover Halftitle page Series page Title page Copyright page Contents Contributors Acknowledgements Introduction: Alzheimer’s disease as a gendered affliction – masculinities between dementia ventriloquism and symptomatic readings 1. Alzheimer’s disease and critical sociocultural constructions of old age 2. Dementia ventriloquism: Speaker positions in AD 3. AD, gendered care and ageing masculinities 4. Conclusion as departure: AD and cultural critique Part One Conceptualizing masculinities, dementia care and embodiment 1 From a ‘care-free’ distance? Adult sons about their parents with dementia: A cross-cultural enquiry 1. Introduction 2. Michele Farina: Borrowing the pain of others 3. Jonathan Taylor: Rationalizing aggression 4. Nick Taylor: Conserving family dynamics 5. Conclusion: Masculinity and control 2 Masculinities in Brazil: Identity tinkering and dementia care 1. Vignette one: Caring for his wife 2. Vignette two: A follow-up consultation at the geriatric clinic 3. Care and recognition 3 Becoming one of the Others: Embodying and eliminating fabricated natures 1. Fabricating and eliminating natures 2. To cut a long (hi)story short: Embodied audio-visual hierarchies 3. Embodying our power structures 4. Elimination from the inside?! Part Two The poetics of dementia and masculinity: Between eulogy and negation 4 Living oblivion: Poetic narratives ofdementia and fatherhood in Pia Tafdrup’s Tarkovsky’s Horses 1. Poetic narratives of dementia and loss 2. Language, literature, and dementia 3. Intertexts as side narratives 4. Conclusion 5 Anne Carson, dementia and the negative self Part Three Masculinity and dementia in film: Between laughter and violence 6 Of bees, boobies and Frank Sinatra: Masculinity and Alzheimer’s in contemporary European film comedies 1. Introducing the corpus of analysis 2. Hegemonic masculinity (revoked), the trickster, and the ability to voice feelings 3. Instead of alternative masculinities: Functionalizing stereotypes 4. Conclusion 7 Writing the past to fight Alzheimer’s disease: Masculinity, temporality, and agency in Memoir of a Murderer 1. Violent masculinity and the concept of the ‘eternal recurrence of the same’ 2. Memorizing and forgetting the past 3. Dementia: Time and temporality 4. Conclusion Part Four Perspectives on masculinity and dementia in memoirs and fictional narratives 8 Stories of exile and home: Dementia and masculinity in Arno Geiger’s Der alte König in seinem Exil and Ian Maleney’s Minor Monuments 1. Introduction 2. Arno Geiger’s Der alte König in seinem Exil 3. Ian Maleney’s Minor Monuments 4. Conclusion 9 Narratives of Parkinson’s dementia and masculinities: Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections 1. Embodying privilege: The intersectional approach to masculinity, old age and dementia 2. Intersectional exploration of gender privilege, age and disease: Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections and ‘My Father’s Brain’ 3. Conclusion 10 Illness memoirs, ageing masculinities and care: The ‘son’s book of the father’ 1. Introduction 2. Tilman Jens: Demenz (2009) – Between mourning the loss of the father and patricide 3. Intertextual responses to Philip Roth’s Patrimony (1991): Relational (auto-) biography as the ‘Son’s Book of the Father’ 4. Philip Roth’s Patrimony : Performing masculinity as ‘female’ care for the father 5. Conclusion Index