ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on embodied aspects of the disease as they are communicated by a range of narrative media, arguing that these embodied aspects shed a more nuanced light on what is lost, what changes, and what remains. It explores the experience of living with dementia through autobiographical accounts both by people with dementia and through a documentary by a family care partner. The chapter reviews how contemporary phenomenology, and particularly the notion of ‘embodied selfhood’ and ‘embodied’ communication have been productively employed in dementia studies. It explains a close reading of contemporary first-person accounts—or autopathographies—by people with dementia. The chapter also explores the potential for intersubjective understanding in David Sieveking’s documentary Vergiss Mein Nicht. It investigates how the notion of embodiment can be productively used to engage with the subjective experience of dementia and, potentially, ground the moral standing of people with dementia not on a cognitive model of personhood but on our embodied nature as human beings.
