Learning to listen: epistemic injustice and gothic film in dementia care education

Abstract

Listening is a critical and under-theorized dimension to struggles against injustice and marginalization. In the wake of critiques from the disability movement of the pre-eminence of expert medical voices, educating professionals to listen to health service users has become particularly critical. The utterances of people with dementia have frequently been subject to, in Miranda Fricker’s terms, “testimonial injustice”: that is, seen as irrational, unreliable, and not to be believed. This article will examine the way in which the generic conventions of the gothic, more specifically what Mary Ann Doane has described as “the paranoid women’s film,” are used in a short film, Darkness in the Afternoon, widely screened in dementia care education in the UK and internationally. Drawing on interviews with dementia care trainers, analysis of training materials, and the film itself, this article proposes that gender and genre is used in this film as a strategy to reorient the listening and affective practices and testimonial sensibilities of health and aged care workers.