Death Positivity, White Respectability
A Critical History of Cicely Saunders and the Hospice Model of Care
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 2371332 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Ara A Francis (0000-0002-5626-5652, College of the Holy Cross, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2025 |
| Volume | 52 |
| Issue | 4-5 |
| Pages | 1203-1222 |
| Publication date | 2025-06-26 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Critical Sociology (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0896-9205 • E-ISSN: 1569-1632 |
| Publisher | SAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1177/08969205251350396 |
| OpenAlex | W4411694441 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 62 |
Social histories of hospice focus on 1960's counterculture and emphasize the progressive, anti-institutional bent of death positive activists. Our accepted historical narrative is that what began as a radical, grassroots movement to humanize end-of-life care gradually became part of the mainstream medical marketplace, making it difficult for hospice to fulfil its potential. This essay complicates that narrative with a close, critical reading of Cicely Saunders' life and work. The death positive movement, I contend, was politically conflicted from the outset. Saunders' approach was radical insofar as she troubled the gendered distinction between professional and personal care and insisted on the value of care work historically coded as feminine; this humanized dying people and caregivers alike. At the same time, Saunders was preoccupied with interior and intimate experience, and her vision of good dying hinged on performances of white respectability. This made hospice care seem apolitical, even as it advanced middle-class, Christian ideas about labor, gender, family, and moral worth. This analysis highlights the privileged, Eurocentric dimensions of death positive ideology and encourages us to look beyond hospice care as we reposition ourselves to address the challenges of 21st century dying
Hospice care · Palliative care · Sociology · Gender Studies · Grief, Bereavement, and Mental Health · Historical Psychiatry and Medical Practices · Medicine · Nursing · Race, History, and American Society · Gerontology
Feeding the family
Cicely Saunders
Cicely Saunders
The Crisis of US Hospice Care
Death and the Migrant
The Epidemiologic Transition
The Birth of the Clinic
Formations of Class and Gender
Gender and Legitimacy in Personal Service Occupations
Hospice—The Time Is Now for Additional Integrity Oversight
Caregiving Networks--Using a Network Approach to Identify Missed Opportunities
The Sociological Imagination
Friendly Societies and the Discourse of Respectability in Britain, 1825–1875
Medicine, Charity and Mutual Aid
The Cost of Caring
The Forgotten Lives of Sociology of Death
A Protohospice at the Turn of the Century
The White Working Class, Racism and Respectability
Critical approaches to death studies
The second shift
Rethinking Modernity
Economies of Dying
There Comes a Time
Decolonizing Britain and Domesticating Women
Migration, nursing, institutional discrimination and emotional/affective labour
The routinization of hospice
Knowing Death Well
Conversion in a Billy Graham Crusade
When everyday life, routine politics, and protest meet
Toward a sociology of finitude
The Staying Power of Analytical Distance
| Unique citing works | 1 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 1 |
| Citation span | 2026 - 2026 (1) |
| Citation velocity | current |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 1 |