My Brother Tried to Eat the Playing Cards: A Phenomenological Reading of Caring and Queering in Dementia

Witnessing my late brother’s dementia was what provided the inspiration for the present article. There are vast numbers of texts about dementia written through a philosophical, and even specifically phenomenological, prism, and lately they have proliferated even more. In this paper, I use some insights from phenomenology, especially critical phenomenology, queer and crip phenomenologies and, in particular, Sara Ahmed’s analysis of objects viewed from queer phenomenology, in order to discuss a particular aspect of the process that characterizes some forms of dementia and cognitive loss. This aspect is the unexpected and sometimes uncanny relation to objects displayed by the being with dementia, and the way in which this relation might reveal something new to us about the world, about how we approach and use objects, and, ultimately, about how the self is conceived and how we might conceive it differently. Reflecting on this will allow some access to the “encapsulated self” of the being with dementia, to what might sometimes seem like a very opaque mind with no ability to share any experiences with others. It might also be illuminating regarding the limited ways in which those of us who have mostly neurotypical minds address the world and its objects, and might offer us insights into new and transgressive ways of approaching the world.