Rethinking interdependency: Desiring messy dependency, Akemi Nishida
How is an idea for social change, interdependency, actualized in the everyday lives of disabled queer people? Based on my conversations with queer disabled organizers of community-based interdependent care networks, I illuminate the challenges and desires that emerge from the network. Practicing interdependency is hard, as it was often influenced by the surrounding capitalist-ableist ideologies and dictated by their internalized respectability politics. They desired, instead, to reclaim their messy dependency and be entangled in each other’s company. I argue that messy dependency is the reality of disability communities and their vision for more inclusive society.
“A Time of Dementia”: Temporality, Care, and Confinement in Dementia Units of American Nursing Homes, Hailee Yoshizaki-Gibbons
Time is a powerful force for people with dementia and their caregivers. Drawing on nine months of ethnographic research in a dementia unit of a nursing home, my project explores how various forms of temporality influence the lived experiences of and care relationships between institutionalized old women with dementia and the immigrant women of color employed to care for them. Drawing on feminist disability studies, I query how time simultaneously operates to reproduce gendered, racialized, classed, aged, and disability oppressions and serves as a site of solidarity, relationship-building, and resistance among old women with dementia and their caregivers.