“Everybody Has Different Levels of Why They Are Here”: Deconstructing Domestication in the Nursing Home Setting

Abstract

This chapter uses a disability studies perspective to deconstruct the relationship between personhood and domestication, as this relationship has been made to appear in interviews with older adults residing in a nursing home in Canada. Our analysis illustrates how assumptions about dementia shape the self-perceptions, experiences of home, and meaning of co-residence for people living in the nursing home setting. Tom Kitwood’s conception of person-centered dementia care is examined as a means of understanding how personhood is imagined within the context of residential dementia care from the perspective of residents without dementia. We trace contradictions in the ways nursing home residents with dementia are imagined and treated as patients rather than persons in what we call “governing texts.” These texts operate at multiple levels, and include global policies, institutional reports, and individual stories. Dominant understandings of dementia treat dementia as either a threat to personhood, and to being and feeling “at home,” or as an opportunity to reaffirm the significance of personhood to being and feeling “at home.” This chapter concludes by offering a counternarrative of dementia that orients to dementia as an expression of “faith in reciprocity and a shared life” (van Manen 1990, 16).