This essay interrogates the common assumption that good care is necessarily human care. It looks to disruptive fictional representations of robot care to assist its development of a theory of posthuman care that jettisons the implied anthropocentrism of ethics of care philosophy but retains care’s foregrounding of entanglement, embodiment and obligation. The essay reads speculative representations of robot care, particularly the Swedish television programme Äkta människor ( Real Humans), alongside ethics of care philosophy and critical posthumanism to highlight their synergetic critiques of neoliberal affective economies and humanist hierarchies that treat some bodies and affects as more real than others. These texts and discourses assist me in proposing a theory of care that regards vulnerability as the normative effect of posthuman vital embodiment, as opposed to an anomalous state that can be overcome or corrected via neoliberal practice.

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Six minutes into Todd Haynes's film Far From Heaven, the fragility of the domestic facade (of a harmonious, loving family) becomes obvious as the supposedly per fect, happy wife Cathy Whittaker receives a phone call from the police informing her that her husband is at the station (picked up, we later learn, for "loitering"). But we expected as much. From the film's opening frames, Far From Heaven's satu rated "technicolor" palette, its mournful yet resolute full-orchestra soundtrack, its gleaming vintage cars, spotless sets, and well-starched costumes all point to the film's reconstitution of a particular past, a representation that relies on our cin ematic knowledge. We recognize the narrative and mise-en-scene as intertextual, as generally drawing on a past representational style that includes most Hollywood film productions from the 1950s. For those audience members in the know, the film has a more specific intertext in its recreation of the "woman's weepie" (Singer 37), a melodramatic mode characterized by female protagonists forced to bear heartache, betrayal, prejudice, and other great injustices. Reproducing cinematic melodrama, particularly the "woman's" domestic melo drama that reached its apotheosis in the work of Douglas Sirk, is a hazardous move, fraught with the usual dangers of reconstituting past forms (audience confusion and rejection, accusations of derivative filmmaking) and the added risk of trivialization stemming from the marginalized socio-historical position of the genre. As Christine Gledhill explains, "the relative invisibility of melodrama today is due to the rise of realism as a touchstone of cultural worth and to its ghettoisation as a Amelia DeFalco is a doctoral candidate at the University of Toronto working on aging and the uncanny in contemporary literature and film.

This article analyzes Benjamin Britten's late works through the lenses of late style discourse and theories of aging, showing how these final compositions can be read as a reflection of the ways in which Britten's illness and physical disability in the last years of his life prematurely ushered the composer into 'old age' and its attendant physical and psychological difficulties. From Death in Venice on, Britten's compositions display an unmistakable preoccupation with mortality, both in terms of subject matter and in terms of an even further finessed concision of musical style. While the stylistic decisions in these last works cannot be divorced from Britten's very real sense and eventual acceptance of the nearness of his own death, neither can they be wholly accounted for by it, marking as they do an undiminished capacity for creative achievement in the midst of significantly diminished physical capabilities.

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