ABSTRACT
This chapter engages in critical dialogues between dementia studies and feminist scholarship. More specifically, the chapter explores how feminist studies can be useful for thinking and rethinking dementia and difference. The chapter engages with two feminist genealogies: feminist difference theory and feminist standpoint theory. Dementia has frequently been conceptualised in terms of negative difference as loss and deterioration, in particular in bio-medical discourse. More recent discourses have in contrast sought to underscore the sameness and normality of people with dementia, but this approach also functions to reinstate people with dementia into cognonormative Western modernist ideals of activity, agency and autonomy. Feminist difference theorists, however, provide ways of thinking affirmative difference. This approach to difference is neither a recourse to pathological difference nor to assimilationist sameness, but enables ways of thinking dementia as lived and embodied difference. The second approach to difference, feminist standpoint theory, concerns the different positionalities of people with dementia. In this argument, people with dementia, in particular those experiencing multiple forms of oppression, are understood as holding epistemic privilege – a particular knowledge of the oppressions of cognitive ableism. The chapter proposes a ‘“demented” standpoint’ as a way of approaching the different and unique knowledge of people with dementia and discusses further how this requires radical rethinking of methodologies in dementia studies.
