PharmAD-ventures: A Feminist Analysis of the Pharmacological Imaginary of Alzheimer’s Disease

Abstract

Abstract:Alzheimer"s disease (AD) may be situated within a cultural landscape produced, in part, by demographics and the marketing strategies of an aggressive biopharmaceutical industry. The simultaneously corporeal and visual domain of advertisements for anti-AD drugs generates dynamic images of gender and embodiment, and it also lends itself to feminist interventions engaging with the images and ideas circulating around aging, medicine, and the body. In this article, we investigate advertisements targeting medical practitioners treating patients with AD. Working within a methodological framework we identify as "feminist visual studies of technoscience", we want to propel the discussion in the direction of a broader corpus of medical media.Through this limited exercise, we hope to make a scholarly contribution to the feminist community by critiquing some of the images emerging within popular/scientific media with regard to Alzheimer"s, a disease collectively imagined within an aging Western population. PharmAD-ventures: A feminist analysis of the pharmacological imaginary of Alzheimer's diseaseIn this article, we will investigate the visual dimensions of the commercial biomedical culture of Alzheimer"s disease (AD).1 The latter is a fatal and incurable disease, and it is diagnosed in more women than men. It has also become an urgent pharmacological concern amidst a Western population contoured by an aging baby-boomer generation (Field and Brackin, 2002). We have gathered our objects of study, a series of advertisements for anti-AD pharmaceutical products, from within various mainstream medical journals spanning the years 1998-2004, including Neurology, The Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, and The Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery, and Psychiatry. The aforementioned are peerreviewed and highly influential medical research journals that disseminate cutting-edge research to a worldwide community of clinical practitioners caring for older adults, or working within the wider field of 2 2 neurological medicine. All three journals, which were accessed in a library in a county hospital in the San Francisco Bay Area, as well as within two European university hospital libraries, one in the Netherlands and one in Sweden, aim to positively reinforce the standards by which neurological medicine is practiced.The widespread visibility of both age-related dementia, and the promise of the "miracle" cure for such among networks of scientists and medical practitioners alike interfacing with Alzheimer"s, is evident in the reappearance of the advertisements within multiple issues of the above journals. The global reach of such AD-discourse is unmistakable, as is its recent cultural urgency. Paralleling an increase in the diagnosis of AD over the last decade, as well as a rising prescription rate for anti-AD drugs, fascination surrounding the disease has also been translated into the wider layers of popular culture in the form of dozens of internationally acclaimed movies.2 Further, AD-discourse clearly intersects with o...

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