‘Most of them come from respectable middle-class families, and suddenly find themselves lost’: Dementia Care as a Middle-Class Conundrum in India
Bianca Brijnath, Monash University
For people with late-stage dementia who are unable to use or understand words or recognise themselves or other family members, and require continuous care for all activities of daily living, class is of little consequence. Yet dementia care in India has been constructed as an inherently middle-class problem. Social and biomedical discourses emphasise that the bodies of people with dementia are to be contained, maintained and disciplined only by those who are related as kin, i.e., care-givers not care-takers. Care work is imbued with physical and emotional labour and is premised upon gender, generation and class anxieties. Using Foucauldian theory and source data from urban India, I argue that care for people with dementia is an exercise in productivity, reorganization and disciplining of bodies. The key question though is whose body: the person with dementia, the middle-class care-giver, or the poorer care-taker?
