Challenging representations of dementia in contemporary Western fiction film: from epistemic injustice to social participation

Fiction film is one of the most influential vehicles for the popularization of dementia. It is likely to have a particular influence on the way dementia is constructed by society at large, not least due to its consumption in the guise of entertainment. In this paper, we will argue that such popularization is rarely innocent or unproblematic. Representations of people with dementia in film tend to draw heavily on familiar tropes such as global memory loss, violence and aggression, extreme dependency on heroic carers, catastrophic prognosis, and early death. Audiences may therefore uncritically absorb discourses which reinforce negative stereotypes and perpetuate the biomedical orthodoxy that everything a person with dementia says or does is ‘a symptom of the disease.’

URI

http://hdl.handle.net/10454/7107

Version

Accepted manuscript

Citation

Capstick A, Chatwin J and Ludwin K (2015) Challenging representations of dementia in contemporary Western fiction film: from epistemic injustice to social participation. In: Schweda M and Swinnen A (Eds.) Popularising dementia: public expressions and representations of forgetfulness. Aging Studies (series). Bielefeld, Germany: Transcript Press.

Link to published version

http://www.transcript-verlag.de/978-3-8376-2710-7/popularizing-dementia

Type

Book chapter