In our first article for this issue, Julia Linares-Roake, Lauren Van Patter, Carla Rice, Erika Cudworth, and Andrea Breen highlight “the messiness and ambivalences of caring relationships.” As luck or fate would have it, the theme of caregiving runs through all of this issue’s articles. As a whole, they demonstrate how caring relationships and their “messiness and ambivalences” apply to interspecies relationships, relationships between individuals, as well as relationships with and within the medical field, and even within our own bodies and minds.
The first two articles focus on caregiving relationships between humans and canines. Linares-Roake et al. use twenty interviews to study dog-human caregiving practices, looking at how people make sense of their relationships with their dogs. Their qualitative analysis reveals an understanding of relationships with caregiving animals that is grounded in ableism and anthropocentricism. In the second article, Luda Gogolushko presents concrete examples of the “messiness and ambivalence” of the relationship between and within species. Gogolushko focuses on The Healing Powers of Dude, a Netflix children’s show about how a disabled boy with an emotional support dog navigates through middle school and his home. Within the show, disability and service animals both are portrayed as a burden to some in the boy’s milieu, while in contrast, other disabled characters are portrayed in more positive ways.
Within the human sphere, ableism and sexism often present as confounding factors within interpersonal relationships in modern society. Shawna Sheperd-Murtagh examines the work of two disabled internet content producers to argue that social media narratives of grief and insidious trauma serve not as endpoints but exist on a “rich affective continuum.” Starting with the premise that grief is an omnipresent experience for many disabled people, Sheperd-Murtagh shows how disabled content creators on social media practice “digital care work” through their platforms. Their experiences on social media navigate the tension between hypervisibility, surveillance and self-representation, and, ultimately, resist dominant themes and processes of ableist oppression through a sort of digital grassroots activism, becoming “catalysts for joy, relationality, and crip futurity.”
For Sarah Manley, a sort of crip joy and care relationship can emerge in literary depictions of dementia. Dementia is typically presented as an experience of loss of autonomy and self, but Manley counters that assumption with her analysis of the 2016 novel Good Morning, Midnight. She examines this novel through disability gain, analyzing how dementia can offer individuals a means to cope with ever-changing and bewildering life experiences as well as the limits of normative time. For Manley, the possibility of dementia gain restructures the relationship those with dementia have with others and to the category of the human in literal and allegorical ways.
As readers of this journal know well, the medical field’s relationship with disability and disabled persons has long been problematic. RB Perelmutter looks to fiction, particularly two 1970s Soviet works, the Strugatsky brothers’ novel Roadside Picnic and the Andrei Tarkosky film Stalker to examine narratives of cure and anti-cure. Perelmutter argues that ablebodiedness is tied to Western capitalist values, but that cure narratives still “exist beyond capitalist societies.” They examine how these Soviet works present complex conceptions of disability that both desire cure while still exploring anti-cure ideologies. Perelmutter’s work complicates the belief that cure ideologies are specific to Western capitalist societies and that cure as a desired outcome can persist despite anticapitalist values, with cultural production reflecting the tension of cure and anti-cure within the narrative structure.
The theme of cure suffuses Moira Armstrong’s analysis of crip and queer oral histories of the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite ablebodied people’s desire for a return to “normal” after the quarantine conditions were lifted, Armstrong highlights the benefits of crip and queer lifestyles as a means for navigating this and future pandemics. Moreover, she points to ways in which crip populations, especially “crip oracles” offer both an understanding of the shifting, continuous nature of the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as offering new frameworks and understandings for management of pandemic and post-pandemic lives.
Christiana Salah’s re-examination of Johanna Spyri’s classic 1880 novel, Heidi, brings us back to care while also adding an examination of cure. Her article illustrates how diagnostic categories change over time and how sexism and eugenic thought have played a role in our perceptions of disabled bodies in older literary works. Going against many interpretations of the work, Salah argues that through Heidi, Spyri offers a surprisingly feminist argument for taking young girls seriously regarding their descriptions of what is taking place within their bodies and minds.
Finally, Joshua Earle takes us into a different realm of care, that of cyborg maintenance. Earle defines cyborg maintenance as the process by which some disabled persons utilize technologies and medicine to sustain their functioning. This “maintenance” is complicated by historical and economic forces that pressure individuals to hide rather than foreground their prostheses and the work involved in maintaining the cyborg bodymind. He argues that cyborg maintenance is first and foremost a maintenance of relationships that reveals the interdependency within networks of care.
Through all these articles, this issue of Disability Studies Quarterly examines care work through a relational lens, attending to how disability provides new and subversive means of survival through the relationships and labor of care.
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