Picturizing the scattered ontologies of Alzheimer’s disease: Towards a materialist feminist approach to visual technoscience studies

Abstract

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is emerging into public view in unprecedented ways. Foremost among these is the embodied form of elderly men and women appearing in commercial imagery for patient advocacy groups or pharmaceutical advertisements, but scientific imagery also seeps into the visual media cultures that surround us. The recent reconfiguration of Alzheimer’s disease is due to expanding ageing populations, an aggressive biopharmaceutical industry becoming a fast-growing material-semiotic realm that is providing powerful images of both gendered and racialized embodiment. Such a visual, and yet highly material, realm is in need of feminist interventions, engaging with the images and ideas that circulate around ageing, medicine, human and non-human embodiment. From a non-representationalist (figural realist) and posthumanist perspective identified as feminist visual studies of technoscience, the authors seek to further the discussion in the direction of understanding the ‘scattered ontologies’ of Alzheimer’s — in laboratory practice, the realm of medical media and in commercial appeals to coherent individuality and human cognition — as gendered domains of figural reality and performative matter.