To foster a generative discussion, we have selected four panelists who present theorizations of age and/as disability across a broad spectrum of the human lifespan. Each panelist will be strictly limited to 12-minute papers in order to allow ample time for Q&A. We believe that these investigations of diverse bodyminds across life stages and in relation to a variety of aesthetic forms–opera, documentary film, the novel–will appeal to a wide range of MLA attendees.

The first two panelists parse the multivalent ways ageism and ableism intersect. Critiquing what Hailee Gibbons (2016) terms “compulsory youthfulness” or the cultural mandate “for people to remain youthful and able-bodied throughout the life course,” they engage with aesthetic works that subvert dominant gerontological narratives and press us to recognize the value of being old and disabled. Michael Kinney will begin with an analysis of the opera Sky on Swings (2010), which centers two older women with Alzheimer’s disease who fall in love after meeting in a care facility. Kinney theorizes how the timbral idiosyncrasies of older singers become building blocks for alternative aging and disability worldmaking. The opera’s intertwining of disability aesthetics and an aesthetics of aging, Kinney argues, challenges narratives of decline central to ageist and ableist notions of voice and narrative.

Clare Mullaney will continue with a focus on what it means and feels like to age into dementia. Reading the documentary film Dick Johnson is Dead (2020) alongside personal stories of her grandmother, she develops a theory of “demented time” to describe the meaningful inversions of past and present modeled by aging people with dementia. While mourning typically frames the dead as lost, Mullaney calls attention to how aging people with dementia recapitulate this loss as presence. If Johnson’s film, in staging several of Dick’s fake deaths, insists that disabled people are not yet dead, her grandmother—in forgetting who is dead—keeps them among the living. Mullaney argues that the way aging people with dementia experience time can provide grounds for a new “cripistemology of memory” that entails the unknowing of categorical distinctions between life and death, absence and presence, past and present.

In light of the ongoing tendency in mainstream media and popular culture to conflate old age and disability, the next two panelists stage an important intervention by parsing the intersection of youth and disability. Evan Chaloupka will examine how childhood embodiments of disability compel innovations in narrative time. In readings of Pearl S. Buck’s The Child Who Never Grew (1950) and Saul Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March (1953), Chaloupka argues that both writers challenge the dominant predicted timelines for disabled childhood through formal innovations that draw into question intellectual disability’s construction as an ageless phenomenon.

Finally, Anastasia Todd will wrap us up with an investigation of the representational politics of disabled girlhood in two documentary films, Miss You Can Do It (2013) and How to Dance in Ohio (2015). Todd demonstrates how both films work to recuperate the disabled girl subject as a valuable proto-citizen and position her as integral to the future of the United States. She unpacks how neoliberal rationality, heteronormativity, and compulsory able-bodiedness/mindedness facilitate the inclusion of certain disabled girls into the national imaginary at the expense of other disabled girls, who are excluded from visions of the future that these documentaries construct.