Sarah Leavitt’s Tangles: Teaching Queer Caregiving Memoir on Disability, and Pedagogy as Resistance

Abstract

This article examines Sarah Leavitt’s graphic novel Tangles: A story about Alzheimer’s, my mother and me (2010, 2011 UK), in relation to queer identity, feminist wilfulness (Ahmed, 2014), and critical disability studies. Tangles takes up themes of lesbianism, disability, and activism, and it does so through storytelling. Studies around life writing and disability, including the dementia disease Alzheimer’s, point the reader strongly toward recognition of the key importance of storytelling in the preservation of selfhood. Whose stories are told, and whose are not, and by whom? How can or does patient selfhood emerge or survive in caregiving narratives written and/or drawn by others? This article examines graphic memoir in the contexts of Comics Studies, Canadian Gender Studies and Critical Disability Studies.

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