Still here, still queer? Queer lives and subjectivities in dementia care

Abstract

This article explores possibilities for the emergence of queer lives and queer subjectivities in dementia care, the meaning of being queer for people living in residential dementia care and how they relate to queer subjectivity. Our study, drawing on qualitative interviews with four people living in dementia care homes, show how being queer was associated with earlier phases of one’s life course and youthful, sexually active bodies. The dementia care home was described as a depersonalized, desexualized and segregated spatial condition where queer subjectivities could not emerge. However, although participants rarely became recognizable and intelligible as queer in the care context their positionalities must be understood in more complex terms than visible/invisible. Instead people in dementia care sometimes engaged in queer opacity as a tactic to refuse visibility in a care context characterized by surveillance and lack of control and agency.