Navigating the Impacts of Dementia: The Experience of Male Spousal Carers.

This article investigates the experience of male spousal carers for women living with dementia. While cultural discourses on care are highly gendered, social scientific research often addresses care relationships in gender-neutral terms. Setting out to address this matter, this qualitative research study incorporated semi-structured joint interviews with 10 couples in which a male spouse cared for a woman with dementia.

The Spousal Unit and Dementia: Investigating the Relational Basis of the Couplehood Concept.

A strong emphasis is consistently placed upon the relational basis of experience within social scientific dementia research. Within this research corpus, the concept of couplehood is increasingly employed, albeit in rather undefined and loosely theorised ways. Moreover, the evaluation highlights that couplehood is often defined by a normative position that seeks to convey an affirmative perspective on dementia and spousal relationships.

Sustaining relational subjectivity: The experience of women with dementia.

The experience of dementia can only be understood adequately if the influence of gender is fully recognised. Research accounts have, however, tended to portray dementia in gender-neutral terms. This qualitative research study aims to redress this imbalance by investigating the gendered experience of women with dementia.

Unyielding selflessness: Relational negotiations, dementia and care.

This article addresses how couples within care relationships engage in negotiations when mutual selflessness is the relational starting point. Evaluation of hypothetical dementia care scenarios offers insights into pressures upon joint decision-making. Strategic interaction models such as 'the prisoner's dilemma' focus on how a person's pursuit of self-interested preferences might be impeded by the self-interest of another person.

Preserving personhood: The strategies of men negotiating the experience of dementia.

An understanding of dementia requires sensitivity to the complex breadth of factors that comprise the person's experiential and social context. This is necessary to ensure that academic and public perspectives on dementia are not subsumed under homogenising discourses that prioritise the neurodegenerative basis of the condition. Gender is one such factor of this 'social location' that must be acknowledged.

Narrative collisions, sociocultural pressures and dementia: the relational basis of personhood reconsidered.

The concept of personhood developed by Tom Kitwood highlights that the experience of dementia has relational dimensions that transcend the neurodegenerative impacts of the condition. This relational focus, however, has been narrowly conceptualised, with the impact of broader sociocultural factors on experience underplayed. The empirical exploration of interaction also requires reinforcement: a tendency for dyadic studies to portray findings in an individualised format hinders the interrogation of interpersonal negotiations.

The making of 'the elderly': constructing the subject of care.

The provision and arrangement of care for elderly people is one of the main challenges for the future of European welfare states. In both political and public discourses elderly people feature as the subjects who are associated with particular needs, wishes and desires and for whom care needs to be guaranteed and organised. Underlying the cultural construction of the care regime and culture is an ideal type model of the elderly person.