Seeing the person within: Visual culture and Alzheimer's disease

This dissertation explores how visual culture constructs, informs, and responds to Alzheimer's disease in the United States. As a potential epidemic and the source of significant contemporary fear, Alzheimer's has moved to the forefront of U.S. consciousness over the past three decades. It is frequently characterized as the newest and most dire health crisis for a number of reasons, not least of which is the clear lack of known cause and cure for the disease, but also because of a steady increase in the number of diagnoses among the elderly. The increased awareness of Alzheimer's accompanies a substantial spike in the diversity and breadth of its mediation: in media coverage, popular cultural narratives, pharmaceutical and healthcare advertisements, public health campaigns, medical research, and philanthropic and political campaigns. Furthermore, the primary symptoms of Alzheimer's, generally articulated as the loss of cognitive abilities and memory, engage problematically with neoliberal biopolitics that increasingly require these abilities as a condition of civic belonging. This dissertation investigates the visually inscribed ethics that enforce this developing subject of Alzheimer's, a subjectivity not just organized through diagnosis and symptom, but also through collective approaches to cognitive personhood, care, and aging.;The dissertation first traces the discovery narrative of Alzheimer's in Europe and the United States at the beginning of the twentieth century through visually oriented research practices and public health. It then explores how a broad range of contemporary representations of the disease contribute to biopolitical formations of cognitive health and identity. Ethnographic analysis of the Alzheimer's education program at the New York Museum of Modern Art highlights perceived relationships between aesthetics, cognitive disability, and modernity. Finally this dissertation explores the slippage between love and care in the visual culture of Alzheimer's, investigating how love as a biopolitical category of governmentality functions to ironically strip social recognition from people with dementia. Ultimately, this dissertation shows how particular forms of historical visual culture orient Alzheimer's within contemporary neoliberal biopolitics. This manifests in the social, political, and economic insistence on certain kinds of mental performance as a conditional armature of personhood in the United States.