Ng, H. 2022. Articulating Silences around Death in Both Sides, Now: Medical Professionals Grappling with Grief. in: Rajendran, C. and Gough, R. (ed.) Changing Places: Drama Box and the Politics of Space Aberystwyth Performance Research. pp. 164-174
| Chapter title | Articulating Silences around Death in Both Sides, Now: Medical Professionals Grappling with Grief |
|---|---|
| Authors | Ng, H. |
| Editors | Rajendran, C. and Gough, R. |
| Abstract | During an age of globalization and consumerism in which the mass media and advertising industry glorify youth and beauty, what does it mean to talk about death and dying in public spaces of Singapore? This essay examines the multidisciplinary community arts project, Both Sides, Now, which examines end-of-life issues, presented by Drama Box, ArtsWok Collaborative, Lien Foundation and Ang Chin Moh Foundation. Focusing on the film series Living Well, Leaving Well created for the first iteration in 2013 screened at Khoo Teck Puat Hospital, I look at how medical professionals participate in the discourse on ageing, dying and death in Singapore. Building on Foucault’s notion of silence, the fear of death is closely related to preoccupation with one’s health, linked to neoliberal principles of public healthcare, official discourse on ageing, dying and death in Singapore. This chapter argues that the films have offered profound insight into how medical workers grieve for patients and their own families and transformed the meaning of space in the hospital as a place of healing. By representing grieving subjects of different genders, ethnicity, age and job designation of the medical profession, the films unravelled silences surrounding the topic of death and dying by suggesting notions of the ‘good’ death commensurate with the disciplinary regimes of using art for community-building and emphasis on the heteronormative family model in Singapore governmentality. In these films, the subjects in grief and grieved for, following Butler, points to the exclusionary conceptions of who is normatively human: what counts as a liveable life and a grieveable death? |
| Keywords | end-of-life |
| film studies | |
| bereavement | |
| medical humanities | |
| multidisciplinary art | |
| Book title | Changing Places: Drama Box and the Politics of Space |
| Page range | 164-174 |
| Year | 2022 |
| Publisher | Performance Research |
| Publication dates | |
| Published | 2022 |
| Place of publication | Aberystwyth |
| ISBN | 9781906499112 |
| Web address (URL) | https://thecpr.org.uk/product/changing-places-drama-box-and-the-politics-of-space/ |