Presenters
Abstract
Older adult care facilities, or “nursing homes” are often places of erasure, used by our society to hide away the elderly. In a youth-obsessed society, aging and particularly the aging of older adults becomes a site of horror, an evocation of mortality in a society that enjoys pretending eternal youth. The elderly are de-voiced and subject to social erasure and the assumption of obsolescence.
Matthew Johnson’s “The Afflicted” provides a space that explores nursing home erasures and the horrors of elder ‘care’. Johnson forces the reader to look directly at the spectre of age by making the aged something that cannot be ignored, making the threat literal by turning the elderly into zombie-like cannibalistic figures. In “The Afflicted”, a disease arises from nursing homes transforms the elderly members of society into beings hungry for fleshy contact. The signs of this new affliction are whitening of the hair, memory loss, papery skin, and disorientation until they become End Stagers, the final point in the virus’ progression where they become hungry for human flesh. The facilities where The Affliction originates were largely run by robots and it is the lack of human contact that propels The Afflicted to become zombie-like and violent, only mitigating their symptoms through contact with others and engagement with the outside world. Johnson explores models of care through his fictional zombified world, examining the rejection of the elderly and the oppression that can arise from distant care and lack of engagement in nursing homes. Although ghettoised and locked in “care” camps, Johnson’s elderly speak back loudly by consuming the society that has rejected them.