Abstract
Queer Theory is a form of theorising that radically challenges all norms related to time, space, materiality and, above all, identity. Emerging from activist responses to the AIDS crisis of the late 1980s and early 1990s, disillusion with mainstream LGBT rights and the influence of post-structural/post-modern ideas in the humanities and subsequently social sciences, it has radically challenged, or troubled, several fields of study, especially those related to gender, sexualities and, more recently, ageing. The chapter explores how Queer Theory further troubles ways of understanding dementia that move beyond the pathological, the normative and the disciplinary. The chapter achieves this by considering how Queer Theory, through a series of non-linear, queer turns, or areas of critique, provides critical dementia studies with a valuable conceptual armoury to challenge the pathologisation and reductive construction of dementia. These turns include those related to 'identity, subjectivity and normativities', 'times' and 'intersections'. However, the chapter also considers limitations with applying a queer lens to dementia and how other critical scholarship can be drawn upon as an adjunct to this.