Coming out when a partner dies? Challenges faced by older women who grieve a same-sex partner
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In a constructivist framework, bereavement experiences are seen as following individualised trajectories. Older individuals who lose a same-sex partner often face additional layers of complexity. At times, they must contend with disenfranchised grief, when, for example, their loss is not recognised.From an intersectional perspective, older women grieving a same-sex partner are thought to face specific challenges, but research about their experience is scarce. To explore the particularities of their social location, we held 18 semi-directive interviews with 10 women over the age of 65 from the Greater Montreal area, in the province of Quebec, Canada. A thematic analysis of the data was conducted.Our results show that older women in same-sex relationships can face difficulties related to the need to name their sexual identity when their partner dies. Following their loss, they may struggle to be and remain visible as a widow. They may also face obstacles, both external and internal, in securing the support they need. We contextualise our results with descriptions of our participant’s varied narratives. The diversity of trajectories is considered in light of the complex interactions between age, sex, sexual identity, and their impact on our participants’ visibility.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.012 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".