ABSTRACT
While in her groundbreaking volume Barbara Creed showed how dominant culture rendered women “monstrous” in horror film after horror film, in this essay I show how new pervasive images unconsciously continue to render women “monstrous” only now in relation to Alzheimer’s disease – the debilitating illness on the increase, especially among women. While, for Creed, the monstrous-feminine was linked to patriarchal fears of female sexuality, reproduction, and motherhood, now the feminine is “monstrous” because memory loss appears to mean loss of subjectivity. Patriarchal fears include terror at losing the individual autonomy required of citizens in advanced industrial nations. The (predominantly female) AD subject is reduced to brain neurons, to a statistic – an element in a study – or to a state of emptiness, often (in images) given a single fixed blank expression. The AD subject is monstrous because absent from herself, situated as an unapproachable “other” that does not “fit” bourgeois capitalist concepts of the viable “citizen”. Here, I examine what’s missing from Alzheimer’s discourses is consideration of the AD person as a whole. Context, language, and emotions, which, in turn, belong to the body as well as the mind, are not given attention. In this context, Dana Walrath insists that “the biomedical story of dementia and how we approach aging globally” is in desperate need of revision. Through an analysis of Walrath’s poignant graphic memoir, Aliceheimer’s (2013), I explore alternative views of the AD subject. The memoir presents a more complex image in which the AD person is no longer seen as “monstrous”, but taken as a subject in her own right, with her own needs and ways of being.
