In “Landscape, Memory, and Forgetting: Thinking Through (My Mother’s) Body and Place,” Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands reflects on her mother’s experience of Alzheimer’s and the complex relationships between minds, bodies, and place (2008, 271). In this paper, I build on Sandilands’s positioning of dementia as a queer ecological subject. Using crip theory, critical dementia studies, and work on dementia, and work on climate change and grief, I propose a queer crip feminist reframing of the meaning of dementia that both informs and is shaped by a queer crip feminist ecology of place. Central to this work is grappling with loss. By thinking about loss, I’m also centering experiences that challenge the tendency in disability studies to ignore or downplay what are deemed more ‘negative’ disability experiences – like dementia and pain (see Samuels 2020, 189-190). How might a queer crip feminist approach to memory, loss, and place help move toward justice for people with dementia as well as more just forms of adaptation to climate changed worlds? What does it mean to lose places and thus a certain sense of oneself? Reflecting on these questions, I suggest, furthers understanding of the meaning and significance of queer crip feminist ecology and the critical relationship it forges between queer ecology, feminist philosophy, and disability studies.
Dr. Kim Q. Hall is Professor of Philosophy at Appalachian State University, where she is also faculty affiliate of the Women's Studies Program. She is author of Queering Philosophy (Rowman and Littlefield, 2022). She is co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of Feminist Philosophy (Oxford, 2021), Editor of New Conversations in Feminist Disability Studies special issue of Hypatia: Journal of Feminist Philosophy (2015, guest editor), and Editor of Feminist Disability Studies (Indiana University Press, 2011).
Sponsored by: Linda Singer Memorial Lecture Fund
