At the turn of the twenty-first century, the eminently popular Harry Potter series imagined “Dementors” as evil forces whose “kiss” leaves victims in a state akin to negative depictions of late-life dementia. In today’s cultural climate, dementia is often depicted as a crisis of ageing but increasingly through indirect, metaphorical pathways. As we will argue, dementia or the fear of it, has entered the cultural domain of mainstream literary productions on a larger scale, often perpetuating harmful stereotypes and reinforcing the othering of people living with the disease. In a first step, we will analyse culturally influential examples of negative representations of dementia, examining its effects on the othering of people with dementia. In a second step, we will turn to positive examples to analyse aesthetic strategies employed to gain more humane portrayals. In conclusion, we argue that a cultural politics of dementia is needed in order to achieve attitudinal changes to dementia in particular and ageing more generally.
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