Citizenship, human rights, and dementia: Towards a new embodied relational ethic of sexuality

Abstract

Sexual citizenship and sexual rights scholarship have made important contributions to broadening citizenship and more fully accommodating rights related to sexuality. However, this scholarship has concentrated primarily on the sexuality and intimacy-related needs of younger people and those who are not cognitively impaired. Consequently, it has inadvertently served to marginalize persons living with dementia who reside in long-term residential care settings. We argue that supporting sexual rights for persons with dementia requires a particular human rights ontology for citizenship-one that recognizes that corporeality is a fundamental source of self-expression, interdependence, and reciprocal engagement. This is an ontology that underpins our model of relational citizenship and that grounds our articulation of an ethic of embodied relational sexuality. In our view, this ethic offers important direction for the development of policy, legislation, and clinical guidelines to support sexual rights for persons with dementia in long-term residential care.

Relational citizenship: supporting embodied selfhood and relationality in dementia care

“…Redressing heterosexist assumptions prevalent in institutionalised health care by supporting lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex sexuality (Archibald , Kontos et al . , Mahieu et al . ) is also vital to the support of sexual expression in dementia care.…”

Praktisering av medborgerskap

“…«Agency» handler om evnen til å uttrykke seg, enten gjennom verbale uttrykk eller kroppsspråk, og knyttes ofte til egenskaper ved individet. For personer med demens kan «agency» vaere kroppslig og habituelt forankret (Boyle, 2013(Boyle, , 2014Kontos, Grigorovich, Kontos og Miller, 2016). Anerkjennelse (recognition) handler om at mennesker har en iboende verdi som må respekteres for at medborgerskap skal bli realisert.…”

Sustaining care for a parent with dementia: an indefinite and intertwined process

“…Moreover, we advocate for the use of broader contextual frameworks when investigating care and caring. Adopting a citizenship lens (Bartlett & O’Connor, 2007; Kontos, Miller, & Kontos, 2017; Kontos, Grigorovich, Kontos, & Miller, 2016), for example, would recognize the political nature of dementia care and promote the rights and opportunities of PwDs and adult children who experience different forms of vulnerability as care is sustained.…”