Contemporary visualities of ill health: on the social (media) construction of disease regimes

First-person representations of illness have been studied as key to the cultural fabric disrupting dominant practices of ill health or disease regimes. However, the role that digital platforms play in shaping this fabric in contemporary societies has been mostly overlooked. We address this gap by investigating how mainstream social media, as mundane spaces modelled by corporate-driven techno-commercial structures, frame specific forms of visuality or ways to see ill health. We reflect on how these forms of visuality relate to existing disease regimes. The article presents an investigation of popular images of BReast CAncer (BRCA) hereditary cancer syndromes posted on Instagram, Twitter (now X) or Facebook over the course of 12 months. By combining cultural analytics, visual network analysis and interpretive techniques, we explore the emergence of platform-specific visual vernaculars and the visual genres of ill health emerging from these vernaculars. Our analysis suggests that, in the context of BRCA hereditary cancer syndromes, popular social media images primarily exacerbate existing racialised and gendered practices. Where alternative views emerge, in their being shaped by platforms’ attention economies, they often operate in what we define as a ‘liminal space’ of imagination – one that hints at renewed, but not necessarily disruptive and certainly not radical ways to imagine ill health.