NotNormativelyHuman 259
that one third of all persons entering such a facility die within the first
six months (Orestis). Because care facilities are such overdetermined
locations, various discursive formations have evolved during the last
decades which have these places as their ostensible object. Following
Ulla Kriebernegg's insightful study, I will here call them, nursing home
narratives.^89 These are prime examples of the genre of narratives of
disappearance.
Narrated in the mode of life writing or fiction, these texts address
social and cultural constructions of elder life as they manifest
themselves in residential care, and sometimes they also attempt to
provide alternative, possibly more empowering narratives about life in
these places. For this purpose, they have developed an impressive array
of especially spatial metaphors such as "open-doored prison" or
"incapacity's basement" (for details cf. Kriebernegg 491-92). That this
should be so may be seen as evidence of how, socially and culturally,
"age"ishereseenasemplaced,"agedandcaged"(Kriebernegg491).
For a cultural critique of residential care locations and practices,
Foucault's (much overworked) term "heterotopia" is coming to mind
("Other Spaces," esp. 24-25 on "crisis heterotopias"), also Goffman's
"total institution" (Asylums1-124). Rather than affixing a label to this
multiplyoverdeterminedplacewhere"age"is,itseemsmoreuseful,for
my critical tastes at least, to focus on what the relations are in such a
placeforhousing—somewouldsay"warehousing"—theelder:relations
between inside and outside, home and abroad, intimacy and formality,
absence and presence, visibility and invisibility—modulations of the
underlyingdialecticsofyoungandold.^90
Such a reading, dialectical to be sure, seems appropriate to come to
terms with the practice that gives name and signature to this location:
care. In what follows I will therefore understand care as an intrinsically
dialogic relationship, a showcase example of what Richard Ganis calls
(^89) Aside from an incisive cultural critical reading of such narratives, Ulla
Kriebernegg also provides a detailed list of relevant material, filmic and textual
(490).
(^90) In a similar vein, Stephen Katz has discussed the conditions of living in
residential,institutional,anddaycarecenters(CulturalAging204);cf.alsoKatz
andMcHugh271-92.