Queering Dementia

In dementia care, it is rarely questioned that the condition signals a breakdown in normative communicative competence that diminishes and finally renders the subjectivity of the sufferer beyond reach. More radical approaches may explore beyond verbal capacity to elicit a recognisable interaction through the use of music, touch, and movement, but could queering dementia offer a more flourish- ing scenario? In recent years there has been an upsurge in potential biotechno- logical interventions in the form of prostheses that claim to offer to those with dementia some tools for maintaining contact with their previous sense of self. Some of these are purely mechanical aids, such as robotic carers or quasi-animal companions, but I want to look too at the significance of some of the more organ- ic dimensions – such as the microbiome and microchimerism – that I also classas prostheses in the sense that they augment an existing materiality. I understand dementia not as an exceptional state marked by a loss of independence, but in terms of the prosthetic nature of all embodiment. What makes that queer is that the entanglement of all bodies with an array of external and internal prosthetic elements is irreducible and unstable, and already constitutes the assemblage that is identified as a person.

Kimiko Does Cancer

KIMIKO DOES CANCER is a graphic memoir written by Kimiko Tobimatsu and illustrated by Keet Geniza. The book tells the story of Kimiko’s experience with breast cancer as a young, queer, mixed-race woman. Set in Toronto, Canada, Kimiko Does Cancer seeks to upend the traditional cancer narrative, confronting issues such as dating while in induced menopause, navigating work and treatment, and talking to well- meaning friends, health care professionals, and other cancer survivors. In the interview below, Lisa Folkmarson Käll talks with Kimiko and Keet about their three-year long collaboration on the project, their hopes for it, the importance of representation and the difficulties of dealing with vulnerability. Page references in the text are to Kimiko Tobimatsu and Keet Geniza’s Kimiko Does Cancer: A Graphic Memoir (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2020).

Post-Pandemic Futures and the Affective Appeal of Immunity

The COVID-19 pandemic has opened up futures for debate in an unprecedented manner and on an unforeseen scale. This article explores how ideas of immunity structured debates about pandemic management strategies as a means of securing a post-pandemic future during the first wave of the pandemic in 2020. Building on queer theorization of temporality, the article asks how ideas of COVID-19 immunity derive their affective appeal and cultural legitimacy, and what is at stake in the imagined futures that unfold from such visions of post-pandemic immunity. The analysis focuses on two affective figures that circulated widely in public discourse in March–May 2020: the figure of the soon-immune nation and the figure of the immune individual. I unsettle these figures by contextual- izing them through the histories of immunity politics around race, gender and sexuality. The analysis shows that the two figures have long affective histories entangled with nationalism, racism and discrimination. The article argues that these histories shape and curtail the kinds of post-pandemic futures that may be enacted and imagined through popular ideas of immunity.

Canceral Imaginaries

This article examines the carceral imaginaries that emerge from the late capitalist structure of organ donation as an issue of short supply. This piece explores this issue through the lens of spatial segregation, arguing that carceral imaginaries are spaces of luxury where donors are segregated from recipients and are thereby legally murdered. The focus is Ninni Holmqvist’s novel The Unit (2008) where the future is structured through gender equality but reproductive normativity. Donors are segregated away in the luxurious unit because they have not repro- duced. Having not produced future generations of labourers, these donors must contribute to the nation by donating their body parts to the reproductive – and therefore productive – members of the nation. Focusing on Sweden’s history of eugenics and on gender equality, this article argues that the very space of care, namely the clinic, which facilitates life-saving treatments also subjects whole populations to violence and death through reproductive norms. Finally, it sug- gests that space is both that through which bodies move, but also the body itself. That is, the segregation of the body’s parts and the idea that space may be divided by borders are mutually constitutive and found both the restrictions of bodily movement through space and murder as the gift of life.

Graphic Trauma

In this essay, I explore examples of what I call graphic trauma and the processof drawing as a form of working through the experience and event of sexual violence. I contend that comics and graphic narratives are a medium well-suited for rendering trauma, and the trauma of sexual violence in particular, as I show in an analysis of Una’s graphic narrative Becoming Unbecoming and Chanel Miller’s animated short film I Am With You. I argue that for both artists, drawing becomes a form of consciousness-raising, a collaborative feminist practice of memory work that attempts to create conditions – formal, therapeutic, and political – for women to say #MeToo and “we.” In my readings of Una’s and Miller’s draw-ing as working through sexual violence, I also demonstrate close verbal/visual description as a practice of care that keeps the testimony moving, drawing out the feminist practice of memory work in time and space and across modalities. A brief coda at the end of the essay offers an image of a hybrid figure from Miller’s graphic iconography and a concept and practice she calls “the third element.” I argue that this third element functions as a formal provocation for counter- modalities that change the story of sexual assault, creating a portal to resistance and healing.

Shame, Stigma, HIV

The affective climate often associated with HIV prevention and care practices is often dominated by negative emotions such as shame, fear and suspicion which arise because of HIV’s historical stigma. This article explores the experiential consequences of this affective climate and the continued stigma associated with HIV, through a focus on the experience of shame anxiety which can be under- stood as the chronic anticipation of shame or shameful exposure. Exploring first- person narratives of gay men living with HIV, the article gives an account of how shame anxiety is central to understanding how stigma causes harm, especially in experiences of chronic illnesses such as HIV. Using a philosophical framework, through phenomenology, it will be demonstrated how shame anxiety manifests in bodily lived experience through the structure of the “horizon”. The article will finish with reflections on how shame anxiety can act as a barrier to the effective delivery of health services for those with stigmatised chronic illnesses and, fur- thermore, why the experience of shame anxiety might be useful to consider when delivering health services.