Abstract:

"Memory Work and Dirty Work: Writing the Labor of Eldercare" identifies the US eldercare memoir as a burgeoning subgenre of life writing. Typically written by daughters about nursing their parents at the end of life, these memoirs—searing accounts of care for declining bodies—make eldercare visible as a major category of unpaid feminized work. Most home care aides in the US are also women, many of them Black and/or immigrants, performing this important job for meager wages. Eldercare memoirs are thus substantially concerned with the nature and devaluation of a particular form of labor. Dramatizing its feminization, they lead me to pursue a further question: to what extent are female aides and their unequal, quasi-familial relationships with daughters given space in these narratives? Texts treated in detail include Sue Miller's The Story of My Father (2003) and Ruth Tosic's I Am Not the Girl: Memoirs of a Certified Nursing Assistant (2021).

摘要：

《记忆工作与肮脏工作：书写老年护理的劳动》将美国老年护理回忆录视为生活写作的一个新兴亚类型。这些回忆录通常由女儿们撰写，讲述在生命的尽头照顾父母的故事，这些回忆录对照顾日渐衰弱的身体进行了深刻的描述，使老年护理成为无偿女性化工作的一个主要类别。美国的大多数家庭护理助理也是女性，其中许多是黑人和/或移民，她们以微薄的工资从事这项重要的工作。因此，老年护理回忆录主要关注特定劳动形式的性质和贬值。他们戏剧化地描述了女性化，让我提出了一个更进一步的问题：女性助手和她们的不平等在多大程度上，与女儿的准家庭关系是否在这些叙述中得到了空间？详细处理的文本包括苏·米勒 (Sue Miller) 的《我父亲的故事》(2003) 和露丝·托西奇 (Ruth Tosic) 的《我不是那个女孩：一名认证护理助理的回忆录》(2021)。