The Intimate Palliative Sphere: Affect, Gender, and the Good Death in Relational End-of-Life Narratives.

Abstract

An increasing number of collaborative end-of-life narratives have been published after the death of the protagonist. Focusing on two examples of women's end-of-life memoirs in contemporary German popular culture, this essay examines how relationality, gender, and affectivity shape the philosophies, practices, and politics of palliative care and the associated concepts of the "good death." Ultimately, I argue that the memoirs foreground a still-marginal narrative and practice of dying at home within an intimate public sphere of palliation that transgresses traditional approaches to care for the dying in contemporary health care. They also contribute to gendered and sentimental notions of family care and of the self-determined and autonomous body and death.