Rethinking dementia as a queer way of life and as ‘crip possibility’: A critique of the concept of person in person‐centredness
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The concept of person-centeredness has become in many instances the standard of health care that humanises services and ensures that the patient/client is at the centre of care delivery. Rejecting a purely biomedical explanation of dementia that led to a loss of self, personhood in dementia could be maintained through social interaction and communication. In this article, we use the insights of queer theory to contribute to our current understanding of the care of those with dementia. We critically discuss the concepts of person and personhood that have become the cornerstone values of person-centred care for persons with dementia (PWD). Some critics, using queer theory as a theoretical approach, contend that person-centred care often (unwittingly) reproduces heteronormative roles in trying to sustain life histories. In doing so, they argue, regendering of PWD is sometimes enforced by care providers who try to safeguard this biographical continuity. Cultural theorist Linn Sandberg also mentions that other axes of domination such as race and class are not conceptualised in person-centeredness approaches, and neither are power asymmetries. Thus, in our article, we revisit the concept of person-centred care as a first step in proposing another way to think about 'beings with dementia' (to avoid the term person). Believing that queer theorists have fallen short in questioning the idea of person or personhood as such, we will build on and broaden Sandberg's critique by demonstrating that queer and crip theory can be understood as a fundamental critique of the (Western) subject and processes of subjectivation. We argue that dementia can be conceptualised as a radical break not only with gendered roles and embodiments, but with many of the norms that make us recognisable subjects. Conceptualising dementia in this way turns it into what Sandberg called an 'emancipatory space' and not merely a pathology.
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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 | 0.022 | 0.022 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.164 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.018 | 0.024 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.015 | 0.030 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".