Gender awareness and feminist approaches in dementia studies

Abstract

Feminist approaches are critical. They explore inequality, oppression, and power dynamics to enable conceptual or social transformation. They recognise gender, race, ethnicity, class, sexual orientation, and other differentiating categories as intertwined in ongoing processes of becoming of individuals and societies. Hence, understanding such complexity is a paramount demand to critical research aiming at changing the disproportional effects of privileges, dis/advantages, and oppression throughout the world. <p>

<p>Despite the importance age and dementia have for the dynamical changes of people’s lives and living conditions, and as organising principles in society, these categories are rarely found in feminist studies, whilst dementia studies suffer from a feminist deficit. The chapter picks up on this paradox, and, along three tracks, explores the potential feminist approaches might have for critical dementia studies. The first section recognises how gender awareness has revealed dementia as a feminised field. The second section discusses how intersectionality as the currently most prominent feminist approach is emerging in dementia studies. The third section promotes feminist posthumanist theory as a particularly promising way forward for critical dementia studies.