Global Intimacies: Innovating the HPV Vaccine for Women's Health

Abstract

According to the Pan American Health Organization’s Silvana Luciani, “New technologies for cervical cancer prevention are revolutionizing public health.” Yet the vaccine for human papillomavirus (HPV) is contested, in part because it evokes politics of contagion that foreground intimate transmissibility (Casper and Carpenter 2008). As a preventive technology, the vaccine promises to reduce rates of cervical cancer by controlling the spread of the causal agent, infectious HPV. It is already reshaping sexual politics and health care relations in the United States and is poised to similarly alter public health practices globally. This essay examines the HPV vaccine’s impact on transnational women’s health, specifically its role in the emergence and consolidation of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) focused on women’s sexuality and reproduction, its impact on cervical cancer screening, and expectations it arouses regarding pandemic HIV. A tangible object that makes and remakes people, things, and places (Helmreich 2003), the HPV vaccine joins a long list of technologies that have reconfigured health care practices and intervened in women’s health. The birth control pill, for example, fundamentally altered bodies, sexual relations, gender politics, and cultural meanings of reproduction (Watkins 1998). A twenty-first-century technology, the HPV vaccine is being introduced into a clinical, cultural, and geopolitical landscape profoundly shaped by modernist yet shifting notions of sex, gender, embodiment, contagion, health, progress, and empire. Specifically, the vaccine builds on and challenges unequal relations among women across geopolitical zones and between nationstates. The technology mediates this fractured—and fractious—landscape in important ways and facilitates new biopolitical practices and forms of social organization. In tracking transnational migrations of the vaccine, we draw upon Foucault’s notion of biopolitics and on feminist science and technology studies. gLObAL inTimACies: innOVATing The hpV VACCine FOr WOmen’s heALTh