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. Cultural standards of masculinity have particular impacts upon men with the condition, thus generating distinctive challenges. This article draws upon qualitative research that included joint interviews with 14 men with dementia and their carers. The analytical focus is on the perspectives of the men with dementia and the strategies with which they respond to the condition. These perspectives are organised via four themes: remaining unmoved, fighting back, emphasising social contributions, and redefining services. This enables exploration of how men adopt particular strategies to preserve their own personhood, which include equable resilience, but also more agential measures to counter the influence of the condition. It is concluded that an approach to dementia research that is more sensitive to masculine-gendered experience is required so that the experience of men with the condition can be conveyed more cogently.