‘There were days I felt empty’: care, affect, and graphic medicine

Abstract

There is a world, invisible to many, of terminally ill people being cared for full time by a loving family member or friend. These caregivers are living with burdens and pressures that even regular visitors can miss. Stan Mack (Stan Mack in Sandra Lee Fenster’s (2000), ‘When a Comic Is Taken Seriously,’ The New York Times) Care and labour are inextricably linked, particularly in the context of chronic illness, as caregivers often bear emotional, social, financial, and psychological burdens that can lead to negative consequences. While several studies have examined the physical and psychological impacts of care labour on caregivers, the felt experiences of caregiving (such as fear, guilt, and disappointment, among others) have not received adequate scholarly attention. The present article seeks to closely read selected sections from Sarah Leavitt’s Tangles: A Story About Alzheimer's, My Mother, and Me, a graphic memoir about Alzheimer’s caregiving, to bring to light the complex visceral experiences of unpaid caregivers. Although Tangles is an autobiographical narrative, it also serves as a means to re-examine the conventional notions of care that undervalue and disregard the lived experiences of caregivers. The article investigates how comics medium facilitates the representation of affective forces that shapes the lived experiences of caregivers. Further, the article also examines how exploring such affective realms render a nuanced understanding of care and caring relation. In doing so, this essay not only characterises care as an assemblage of bodies, discourses, performances, and affective relationships, among other things, but also underscores the cultural significance of graphic medicine in critiquing the traditional notions of care.