Aging, Crip Time, and Dependency Care in Joyce Farmer’s <i>Special Exits</i>

Abstract

This essay explores how Joyce Farmer’s Special Exits resists the prevailing decline-burden discourse concerning aging-into-disability and dependency care by imagining alternative perceptions of aging-into-disability temporal and caregiving constructs that are not centered on productivity, independence, and progress. Drawing on Alison Kafer’s “crip time” and Eva Kittay’s “dependency care” concepts, the essay examines a fundamental reorientation that resists ableist-dominated descriptions of normative timelines, and shows how Farmer uses narrative pacing in Special Exits to match the ways that its older adult characters respond to physical and mental challenges that require flexibility and adjustment. The author also shows how aging-into-disability can be reimagined through a crip time lens that emphasizes new forms of living with and in relationship to time instead of only considering deficits and losses. The second part discusses how crip time and care time intersect, and how caregiving takes on a transformative meaning for the story’s characters when dependency is viewed as facilitating interdependence and connection, thus transforming care-giving into care-gifting. Farmer uses this intersection along with an aging-disability nexus lens to address the ongoing need for counternarratives to challenge normative perceptions of aging and disability, and to promote a future in which individuals with age-associated disabilities can flourish by accepting and acting in accordance with their own time requirements.