Dementia and gender in public forum discourses
Though gender differences have been attested in medical research as well as qualitative offline interview studies, public societal dementia discourses often oscillate between practices of ‘de-gendering’ and applying double standards when representing people with dementia. Against this background, th...
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| Main Authors: | , |
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| Format: | Article (Journal) |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
December 2025
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| In: |
Discourse, context & media
Year: 2025, Volume: 68, Pages: 1-9 |
| ISSN: | 2211-6966 |
| DOI: | 10.1016/j.dcm.2025.100952 |
| Online Access: | Verlag, kostenfrei, Volltext: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dcm.2025.100952 Verlag, kostenfrei, Volltext: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2211695825001011 
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| Author Notes: | Sonja Kleinke, Monika Pleyer |
| Summary: | Though gender differences have been attested in medical research as well as qualitative offline interview studies, public societal dementia discourses often oscillate between practices of ‘de-gendering’ and applying double standards when representing people with dementia. Against this background, there is a dearth of research into family care partners’ bottom-up construction of gender in online forum interactions, including how care partners understand and depict their person living with dementia in participatory forum contexts. Applying a dynamic discursive approach to pertinent public threads from Dementia Support Forum (Alzheimer’s Society UK), our paper aims to answer two central questions: Are there gender-related patterns of participation in the discussions? And (how) do care partners gender their person living with dementia explicitly or implicitly in different mediated micro-contexts of forum interaction? Our study reveals that in these forum discussions, gendering has relevance at three levels: the meta-discursive level of participation patterns, explicit ascriptions of gender roles and, implicitly, in correlations with dementia-related conduct. Our findings also indicate that the concrete practices of gendering may, at least partly, be determined by their respective mediated micro-contexts; communal threads may tacitly encourage users to apply double standards implicitly while long-term diary threads leave more room for explicit identity-maintaining gendering. |
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| Item Description: | Online verfügbar: 01. November 2025 Gesehen am 17.02.2026 |
| Physical Description: | Online Resource |
| ISSN: | 2211-6966 |
| DOI: | 10.1016/j.dcm.2025.100952 |