Mediating Kinship

Comparing two contemporary Norwegian graphic novels depicting a son’s experience with a parent’s dementia, this article explores what a relational perspective on dementia entails and how processes of kinship are mediated in the comics form. The first part of the article outlines several “relational challenges” connected with dementia literature and other forms of life writing from a caregiver’s perspective. In the second part of the article, I analyse and compare Trond Bredesen’s Mora mi (My Mother, 2023) and Martin Erntsen’s Men hvem er du? (But Who Are You? 2023), focusing on how these graphic novels show and perform mnemonic practises that can be linked to a processual view on kinship. Building on this view on kinship and relationality as intersubjective processes in need of mediation, I return to the relational challenges of dementia literature to suggest a shift in focus: from the dialectic between the carer and the vulnerable person towards the relationship itself, and from questions about narrative and narratability towards questions about media and mediation. This perspective is summed up in the term remedium, which provides a conceptual framework for understanding the remediating, and potentially remedying, cultural processes connected with aesthetic and literary media considering their media specificity.