Vol. 24 No. 42 (2025): Literary Explorations of Health and Kinship
Originalartikler

Mediating Kinship: Relational Perspectives on Dementia in Two Norwegian Graphic Novels

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  • Silje Haugen Warberg
Silje Haugen Warberg
NTNU
Forside med overskriften: Literary Explorations of Health and Kinship. Billedet på forsiden forestiller en ældre kvinde i en sofa, der ser undrende på maleren.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.7146/tfss.v24i42.143944

Published 2025-06-05

Keywords

  • Graphic Novels,
  • Dementia,
  • Relational pespectives

How to Cite

Warberg, S. H. (2025). Mediating Kinship: Relational Perspectives on Dementia in Two Norwegian Graphic Novels. Tidsskrift for Forskning I Sygdom Og Samfund - Journal of Research in Sickness and Society, 24(42), 57–85. https://doi.org/10.7146/tfss.v24i42.143944

Copyright (c) 2025 Silje Haugen Warberg

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

Abstract

Comparing two contemporary Norwegian graphic novels depicting a son’s experience with a parent’s dementia, this article explores what a relational perspective on dementia entails and how processes of kinship are mediated in the comics form. The first part of the article outlines several “relational challenges” connected with dementia literature and other forms of life writing from a caregiver’s perspective. In the second part of the article, I analyse and compare Trond Bredesen’s Mora mi (My Mother, 2023) and Martin Erntsen’s Men hvem er du? (But Who Are You? 2023), focusing on how these graphic novels show and perform mnemonic practises that can be linked to a processual view on kinship. Building on this view on kinship and relationality as intersubjective processes in need of mediation, I return to the relational challenges of dementia literature to suggest a shift in focus: from the dialectic between the carer and the vulnerable person towards the relationship itself, and from questions about narrative and narratability towards questions about media and mediation. This perspective is summed up in the term remedium, which provides a conceptual framework for understanding the remediating, and potentially remedying, cultural processes connected with aesthetic and literary media considering their media specificity.

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