Adverts tell a story and comprise images that old men encounter in their everyday lives, and which provide popular scripts on ageing masculinity. This chapter focuses on old men’s own understandings of advertising and their depictions of old men. Focus group interviews with Swedish old men, aged between 65 and 92, were conducted, with commercial adverts featuring old men used as visual prompts to invite discussions on masculinity and ageing. The advertising shown reflects both negative and overtly ageist images, and images of the so-called successfully ageing old man; adverts appealing to identification and aspiration, adverts inciting laughter and appreciation, and adverts creating a sense of resistance or rejection. Different readings of the shown adverts emerged, which point to the polysemic nature of media texts. The chapter discusses prominent themes from the transcribed and coded focus group interviews, on embodied ageing, ageing in different stages of life, masculinity and societal changes in terms of gender equality and the role and status of old men.

Vi, 1 620 forskare samt lärare vid universitet och högskolor, är eniga med de unga bakom Auroramålet: De drabbas och riskerar att drabbas allvarligt av klimatkrisen under sin livstid. De klimatåtgärder vi vidtar i närtid avgör deras framtid. Sverige måste ta ansvar och göra sin rättvisa andel av det globala klimatarbetet. 

I strid med Parisavtalet ökar utsläppen av växthusgaser i en takt som gör att 1,5-gradersmålet kan överskridas om några år. De globala effekterna blir allt mer synliga med ständiga temperaturrekord, smältande isar, havshöjning och extremväder som torka, förödande bränder och skyfall med enorma översvämningar, som i Pakistan nyligen. Försörjningen av befolkningen utsätts för allvarliga hot i många länder.

Minskningen av den biologiska mångfalden är extrem. Klimatkrisen är enligt WHO det största hotet mot människors hälsa i hela världen och barn utgör en särskilt sårbar grupp. Med Sveriges nordliga läge sker uppvärmningen här dubbelt så fort som det globala genomsnittet. Det förskjuter utbredningsområden för växtlighet och sjukdomsbärande insekter och ökar förekomsten av extremväder såsom värmeböljor, skogsbränder och översvämningar samt av många olika sorters infektioner och allergier. När extremväder ökar, ökar även stressen och risken för mental ohälsa. Värmeböljor ökar risken för sjukdom och död hos sårbara grupper som äldre, små barn och personer med kroniska sjukdomar. De negativa effekterna på hälsan kommer att öka i takt med klimatkrisen och barn riskerar att drabbas av ackumulerade negativa hälsoeffekter under hela sina liv. Redan i dag är mer än hälften av unga mellan 12 och 18 år i Sverige ganska eller mycket oroliga för klimat och miljö. Detta är förståeligt när våra beslutsfattare inte gör vad som krävs.

Den juridiska och moraliska grunden för arbetet mot klimatförändringarna är att varje land måste göra sin rättvisa andel av det globala klimatarbetet. Centralt i det internationella klimatramverket är att rika länder med höga historiska utsläpp, däribland Sverige, måste gå före resten av världen. Dessa länder måste också bidra till att finansiera klimatomställningen i länderna i det Globala Syd, som är minst ansvariga för klimatkrisen men drabbas hårdast. Denna rättviseprincip är tydlig i Parisavtalet och var en het diskussionsfråga under COP27 i Sharm el-Sheikh, men lyser med sin frånvaro i det svenska klimatarbetet. 

Sverige har satt mål för att minska sina utsläpp. Men de är helt otillräckliga: minskningstakten är för låg och målen tillåter samtidigt att åtgärder skjuts på framtiden. Dessutom exkluderas merparten av Sveriges utsläpp från de svenska nationella utsläppsmålen; bland annat utelämnas utsläpp som svensk konsumtion orsakar utanför Sveriges gränser, utsläpp från utrikes transporter och utsläpp från markanvändning och skogsbruk, exempelvis utsläpp från förbränning av biobränslen eller utsläpp från dikade våtmarker (Prop. 2016/17:146 s.25-28).

Sverige saknar dessutom ett eget mål för att öka upptaget av växthusgaser genom utökat skydd och restaurering av ekosystem, något som krävs för att begränsa de värsta konsekvenserna av klimatkrisen (IPCC s.32). Trots dessa låga ambitioner misslyckas Sverige med att nå sina utsläppsmål, konstaterar både Klimatpolitiska rådet och Naturvårdsverket. En klimatpolitik i linje med Parisavtalet kräver både att alla typer av växthusgasutsläpp minskar samtidigt som – inte i stället för – upptaget av växthusgaser maximeras: i dag misslyckas Sverige på bägge fronter.

Slutsatsen är tydlig. Sverige vidtar inte de åtgärder som krävs för att skydda barns och ungdomars rättigheter enligt Europakonventionen till skydd för de mänskliga rättigheterna. Detta medför allvarliga risker för liv och hälsa för unga generationer, människor i andra länder och särskilt utsatta grupper. Detta kan inte fortsätta. Därför ställer vi oss bakom Auroras krav att Sverige börjar göra sin rättvisa andel och omedelbart sätter igång ett omfattande och långtgående klimatarbete som vilar på vetenskaplig grund och sätter rättvisa i centrum.

Despite person-centred approaches increasingly focusing on looking at the person in dementia instead of the pathology, the role of gender in dementia has been little explored. This article discusses how pervasive discourses on a loss of self and dementia as abject are interwoven with a de-gendering of persons with dementia. The cultural anxiety that dementia evokes in terms of loss of bodily and cognitive control could also be linked to a failure to normatively and intelligibly express gender when living with dementia. As a way to sustain personhood for people with dementia and challenge discourses on people with dementia as ‘non-people’, person-centred approaches have emphasised the collaborative work of carers, relatives and persons with dementia. Often implicitly, this also involves a ‘re-gendering’ of persons with dementia where gendered biographies and pasts are upheld and gendered embodied selfhood is maintained through, for example, dress, hair and other aspects of appearance. This re-gendering could be of great significance for people with dementia to become intelligible as persons. Still, dementia studies must further consider non-normative expressions of gender and involve feminist theorising on gender as a power asymmetry since some embodiments and selves are more likely to be sustained in dementia than others.

New sexual scripts on later life are emerging, discourses on “sexy oldies” challenge pervasive discourses on asexual old age. Still, sexuality among people with dementia, who are generally older, is rarely affirmed. Research on sexuality and dementia is, moreover, dominated by biomedical accounts that regard sexual and intimate behaviours as expressions of pathology. However, sexuality and intimacy could be significant aspects of later life, also when living with dementia. This qualitative study explores experiences of sexuality and intimacy among heterosexual couples where one partner was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. Interviews were conducted with seven couples, aged 55–87, and both the person with the dementia diagnosis and their partner participated. The findings point to a diversity of experiences, with differences between the older and younger couples. The older couples experienced changes more as a result of embodied ageing, and sexuality and intimacy were experienced as sources of pleasure, comfort and recognition. The younger couples understood changes more as caused by Alzheimer’s disease and experienced a greater loss of intimacy and desire. The study shows how experiences of sexuality and intimacy when living with dementia are shaped by varying sexual scripts and expectations of health in different parts of the life course.

People with cognitive disabilities are commonly positioned as risky sexual subjects. This article discusses the discursive production of sexual normates in the form of desirable and normative able-minded sexual subjects, in scientific research on the sexuality and cognitive disabilities of younger and older individuals (in particular those with dementia). We identify three interrelated discourses: regulating sexuality; fostering sexuality; and preserving sexuality. The first of these, regulation, pathologises sexuality of people with cognitive disabilities as faulty and in need of restriction. The second discourse, fostering, is more affirmative and argues for educating for a 'healthy' sexuality of people with cognitive disabilities, to mitigate risks of abuse. This discourse is more salient with younger people. The third discourse, preservation, in contrast, is more visible with older people with dementia and affirms sexuality so long as it is consistent with a 'genuine' or 'authentic' sexuality of the past. In conclusion, scientific research reinforces the cultural ideal of the rational and autonomous individual (and as such the mature/adult) capable of making independent decisions and engaging in healthy, good sex, based on stable sexual identities. Findings demonstrate how age intersects with cognitive ableism to intensify the cultural anxiety that exists around the sexualities of people with cognitive disabilities.

This article explores imaginings of transgender ageing, and more specifically visions of transfeminine ageing futures, through an analysis of the auto-fictional novel Q by Swedish author Fredrik Ekelund. The novel tells the story of Fredrik, who comes out as transvestite at the age of 60, and subsequently struggles to come to terms with and explore their transfeminine identity as Marisol. Overall, cultural representations of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer ageing are rare, and often tell tales of misery. As such, Q is a unique example of a complex and relatively positive narrative of transgender ageing. On the one hand, transgender ageing is portrayed as a potential escape from both time and growing old, a form of “rebirth”. On the other hand, failure emerges as a constant threat, including both the failure to perform age-appropriate femininity and failure in the sense of becoming stuck with self-loathing and shame. The protagonist’s struggles to age successfully become intimately connected with pride and standing up for oneself, struggles that are in turn bound to homonationalist discourses of Scandinavian progressiveness and LGBT exceptionalism. 

Subjectivity is a widely explored topic in dementia studies, in both the humanities and the social sciences. Persistent discourses of “a loss of self” in dementia have been challenged by scholars, who argue for the need for continued recognition of the person with dementia and that subjectivity in dementia may be sustained. So far, however, there is a lack of discussion about the significance of gender, and how being recognised as a subject overall is closely intertwined with being recognised as a gendered subject. This article explores how gender matters to the recognition of subjectivity in dementia. But it also explores how dementia as a position of cognitive otherness may impact upon and disrupt gender performativity. The discussion builds on narratives from an interview study on intimacy and sexual relationships among heterosexual couples living with Alzheimer’s disease, as well as the narrative of the Swedish autobiographical novel Minns du? [Do you remember?] (Beckman, 2019), in which the nonbinary transgender narrator Alice seeks to recollect the memories of their partner AnnaBelle, who is living with a memory-related illness. The article shows how reiterations of gender could be significant in sustaining subjectivity for a person with dementia. But it also shows how cultural tropes of persons with dementia as strange(rs), children or animals position them as unintelligible and thus as unrecognisable gendered subjects. The novel, in contrast, provides an alternative form of worldmaking in which intersubjective recognition is not dependent on either cognitive function or binary gender within a heterosexual matrix.

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.

This article explores possibilities for the emergence of queer lives and queer subjectivities in dementia care, the meaning of being queer for people living in residential dementia care and how they relate to queer subjectivity. Our study, drawing on qualitative interviews with four people living in dementia care homes, show how being queer was associated with earlier phases of one's life course and youthful, sexually active bodies. The dementia care home was described as a depersonalized, desexualized and segregated spatial condition where queer subjectivities could not emerge. However, although participants rarely became recognizable and intelligible as queer in the care context their positionalities must be understood in more complex terms than visible/invisible. Instead people in dementia care sometimes engaged in queer opacity as a tactic to refuse visibility in a care context characterized by surveillance and lack of control and agency.

This chapter introduces critical dementia studies and gives a brief overview of the chapters and the thinking behind the structure of the volume. The introduction discusses the timeliness of critical dementia studies and the impetus behind the volume. Dementia is commonly understood as a disease category, ahistorical and value-free. Critical dementia studies, however, approaches dementia as a socially produced, political category, open to transformation and social change. Overall, critical dementia studies encompasses a diverse set of approaches that problematise, defamiliarise, denaturalise and destabilise common assumptions and orthodoxies in dementia research, policy and practice.

Går det att vara sexuellt aktiv på äldreboendet? Hur kan man öka sexlusten när man blir äldre? Hur påverkar kroppens hormoner sexualiteten när man åldras? Vad är äldres sexuella rättigheter? Vad kan bidra till förbättrad sexuell hälsa hos äldre hbtq-personer? Och kan man ha sex med en slak penis?  

Denna antologi synliggör och ökar kunskapen om äldres sexualitet. Sexuell hälsa är en grundläggande del av hälsan och välbefinnandet under hela livet men många som arbetar med äldre saknar kunskap om äldres sexualitet. Boken är ett samarbete mellan forskare och erfarna sexualupplysare där läsaren får ta del av både forskning och kliniska erfarenheter från området. 

Antologin utgår från normkritiska perspektiv och synliggör den mångfald som finns av både äldre personer och av sexualiteter. Den har en positiv och bekräftande syn på sexualitet samtidigt som den också behandlar problem och utmaningar som kan uppstå.

Boken riktar sig till alla som arbetar med äldre och kan användas inom utbildningar i hälso- och sjukvård, omsorg och socialt arbete. Den ger både kunskap och konkreta verktyg för att kunna främja äldres sexualitet. Boken innehåller även kunskap och råd riktade till äldre själva. 

Bokens redaktörer är forskaren Linn Sandberg, docent i genusvetenskap och verksam vid Södertörns högskola, och Suzann Larsdotter, auktoriserad sexolog och legitimerad hälso- och sjukvårdskurator. Sandberg har under många år forskat om äldres sexualitet och Larsdotter har lång erfarenhet av att föreläsa och utbilda kring området.

In recent years, there has been a rise in portrayals of greying protagonists in popular fiction, often featuring older people in humorous and heart-warming stories. An emerging genre within this literature is the “geezer and grump lit”, a genre where older people are active protagonists, and while often portrayed as grumpy “’usually turn out to have a heart of gold’” (Swinnen, 2019). A notable example of a book in this genre is the internationally bestselling novel A Man Called Ove (2012) by the Swedish author Fredrik Backman. Telling the story of the 59-year-old Ove who sets out to take his own life, the novel can be understood not only as a cultural representation of ageing, but more specifically a cultural representation of ageing masculinity. But how is this popular novel read and responded to by old men themselves? This article builds on a focus group study with Swedish men aged 65–92 who read and discussed A Man Called Ove. The aim of this article is thus to explore how men read the novel and how these readings function as ways of constructing, negotiating and challenging ageing masculinity and the old man as a gendered and aged position. Findings of the study show how discussion of the novel generated a variety of “imaginary positions” through which the participants made sense of what it means to be an old man in contemporary Sweden, including positions such as the active aspiring ageing man, the passive lonely old man, the embodied and vulnerable old man, and the dutiful old man. Future research should explore how other literary genres may provide ways of understanding how old men's gendered and aged subjectivities are constructed.

This paper explores the potential for cultural gerontology to extend its ideas of diversity in aging experiences by opening space to rethink conceptions of successful aging futures. We propose a ‘queering’ of aging futures that disrupts the ways that expectations of a good later life and happy aging are seen to adhere to some bodies and subjectivities over others. Drawing on feminist, queer, and crip theories, we build on existing critiques of ‘successful aging’ to interrogate the assumptions of heteronormativity, able-bodiedness and able-mindedness that shape the dividing lines between success and failure in aging, and which inform attempts to ‘repair’ damaged futures. Conclusions suggest that recognizing diversity in successful aging futures is important in shaping responses to the challenges of aging societies, and presents an opportunity for critical cultural gerontology to join with its theoretical allies in imagining more inclusive alternatives.

Hösten 2020 genomförde den danske politikern Rasmus Paludan och den svenske konstnären Dan Parks islamkritiska manifestationer i Malmö och Stockholm. Under dessa manifestationer skändandes exemplar av Koranen på allmän plats. I Malmö möttes detta med våldsamma protester. Men dessa prövningar bidrog också till att i alla fall tillfälligt stärka banden mellan polisen och de muslimska trossamfund man samarbetade med för att lugna ner stämningarna. Signaler kom också om att det stärkte tilliten till polisen bland boende i de områden där manifestationerna hölls. Rapporten fokuserar på polisens erfarenheter av samverkansarbete i samband med dessa manifestationer och efterföljande protester.

In this chapter we set out certain guiding co-ordinates for future critical methodologies for dementia studies and appraise existing approaches through a critical lens. The chapter brings into dialogue the work of two critical commentators and considers the implications of their work for dementia studies. The first, Alison Kafer, has outlined an integrative approach that marries feminist, queer and crip perspectives to propose a political-relational framing of illness and disability. The second, Patti Lather, a feminist ethnographer, has called for a different kind of ethnography, one that works in the ruins of confident social sciences and that embraces uncertainty and unknowing as methodological strengths. We focus particularly upon word-based and spoken methods, raising questions about the status of this type of research data and how it is handled and subsequently communicated. In particular, we seek to disrupt and open to question common assumptions, routines and unmarked aspects of the research process in dementia scholarship. Drawing upon arguments and insights developed in the course of this book, our discussion leads to a call for dementia researchers to bring ourselves closer in to the experiences of people living with dementia while questioning and distancing ourselves from notions of dementia as a fixed and stable category.