Gifts of Time: Disrupting Dominant Temporalities in the Dementia Unit

Within the dominant U.S. cultural imagination, dementia care is often constructed as a significant physical, mental, emotional, and financial burden, with a huge cost to individuals, families, and society. This cultural anxiety positions dementia as a signifier of dependence, helplessness, frailty, and loss. However, feminist disability studies offers a way to approach dementia and care as relational, collective, and political. Drawing on nine months of ethnographic research in the dementia unit of a nursing home, I illustrate how dementia care is a site of collectivity, resistance, and activism in a context of exploitation, control, and oppression. I uncover how institutionalized old women with dementia and immigrant and nonimmigrant women of color care workers navigate strict institutional routines, pressures of time management, and tightly controlled, predetermined care tasks and how they withstand these forces by making time for and giving time to one another, continuously (re)building relationships and investing in collective care that emphasizes interdependence.