In this chapter, we argue that aging with and into disability unsettles and challenges both cultural representations of aging solely as decline and of disability as separate and shorn from growing old. We develop this argument through analyzing six narrative films made by diversely located people living with mind/body differences. The films were produced as part of Re•Vision, a media centre at the University of Guelph in Ontario that works with aggrieved communities and their allies. From the Re•Vision archive, we chose videos made by storytellers who identify wholly or partially with categories of disability, aging, and more, and by those whose works take up themes of aging and disabled bodies and time. The videos provide alternatives for re-visioning relationships between non-normative embodiments and temporalities. These counter-hegemonic stories of aging with and into disability strongly suggest two ways in which critical scholars might engage differently with systems and discourses related to aging and disability. First, the stories press us to orient to disabled and aging embodiments as continuously in-process and to disabled and aging futures as livable and even desirable. And second, they point to potentially generative theoretical and experiential grounds for building coalitions between aging and disability studies and advocacy. One potential avenue of coalition lies in both groups’ possible embodied disruptions of time. Storytellers from our project articulate experiences of time as “cripped”—as non-linear, non-progressive, circular, and open-ended. People who watch these films are brought into a non-normative timescale, wherein past and future both hold potentialities in and through difference. They are also brought into representations of difference as processual becomings around which collective possibilities may abound.
Changfoot, N., & Rice, C. (2020). Aging with and into disability: Futurities of new materialisms. In K. Aubrecht, C. Kelly, & C.Rice (Eds.), The aging-disablity nexus (pp. 163–179). UBC Press.
