Our panel focuses on graphic representations of aging and end-of-life, two areas that do not yield easy answers, or cures. Our panelists will consider work that offers visual and verbal enactments of queer grief related to losing a partner to assisted suicide (MAiD), the stigmatization and dehumanization of people with dementia, and the inherent conflicts and frustrations of long-term care (whether at-home or residential) for people with age-related illnesses.
Our rationale for organizing a session on representations in words and images of queer grief and assisted suicide, Alzheimer’s, and long-term care stems both from an increasing societal awareness of how rapidly populations in the US and globally are aging (and facing age-related illnesses and care requirements), as well as from the power of graphic narratives to increase understanding and empathy for conditions clouded by stigma and fear. As comics scholar Hillary Chute asserts in Disaster Drawn, the strength of the comics medium lies in its ability “to intervene against a culture of invisibility” (5). Our panel seeks to call attention not only to the healthcare issues themselves but also to the power of the comics medium to address them.
In addition to the fields of graphic narrative and graphic medicine, our work builds on scholarship in queer theory, autobiography/memoir, feminist and critical disability ability studies, and ageing and dementia studies. Key texts that our panelists will draw on include: Sara Ahmed’s The Cultural Politics of Emotion, Julia Watson and Sidonie Smith’s Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives, G. Thomas Couser’s Vulnerable Subjects: Ethics and Life Writing, Eszter Szep’s Comics and the Body: Drawing, Reading, and Vulnerability, and Kathleen Venema’s Picturing What Happens at the End: Graphic Narratives of Ageing and End of Life.
Our panel will operate as follows: Each one of our three panelists will have 15 minutes to present a 7-8-page double-spaced paper with accompanying slides. This will leave 30 minutes for discussion. The panel organizer will serve as Presider and will introduce all the panelists briefly at the beginning and keep time during each presentation, notifying the presenters at 7 minutes, 14 minutes, and at time. The panelists will prepare questions ahead of time to ensure engagement among the three papers, and the Presider will prepare additional questions for all three panelists to consider, should the audience not have questions immediately.
Dr. Jane Tolmie will lead the panel with her paper on the “Autographics of grief: Approaching assisted dying through Sarah Leavitt’s Something, Not Nothing.” Her paper will focus on Leavitt’s experimental comics of loss, her “visual curation of queer grief,” and her response (in words and images) to her partner’s death by the controversial process of Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD). Ultimately, Tolmie hopes her paper will encourage a larger conversation about the self as situated within community and graphic story/telling practices.
Dr. Weihsin Gui will be the second presenter, delivering his paper “Dementia and the embodied self in comics from Singapore,” specifically, Melanie Lee’s and Arif Rafhan’s Amazing Ash and Superhero Ah Ma. Professor Gui will read the comic as a work of graphic medicine, underscoring its importance in encouraging readers to see people with dementia as “embodied selves” rather than passive receivers of care.
Dr. Davida Pines will be the third speaker. Her paper “Relational Citizenship in the Comics of Longterm Care: Dying for Attention and Little Josephine,” will, like the previous two papers, consider the graphic representation of the self in relation to community. Specifically, this paper will consider how two graphic narratives seek to represent long-term care as necessarily reciprocal and embodied, with people living with age-related illnesses being drawn as active partners in their own networks of care.
Our panelists come to MLA from Ontario, Canada, Riverside, California, and Boston, Massachusetts. Our panel brings together a diversity of topics in graphic medicine even as our focus on ageing, age-related illnesses, and long-term care unifies our conversation. The works of graphic medicine that we will discuss represent experiences from authors living in Canada, France, and Singapore. We are confident in the diversity of perspectives our panel invites and represents.