Sexualizing cancer: HPV and the politics of cancer prevention. By LauraMamo, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2023. pp. 360. $35.00. ISBN: 978‐0226829296
Year: 2024
Type: book-review
Abstract: In Sexualizing Cancer, sociologist Laura Mamo examines the production of human papillomavirus (HPV) knowledge and the entanglements between sex and cancer.Joining scholars who have documented the HPV vaccine rollout in the early 2000s, Mamo's work deepens our understanding of viral sociality and, in the case of HPV, the gendered sexual politics at play in a new regime of cancer prevention.Employing a multi-sited ethnographic approach to trace HPV knowledge, talk and clinical practice backward and forward, what unfolds in Sexualizing Cancer is not a simple story of Big Pharma's vaccine production or Big Brother surveillance, but rather, as Mamo makes clear, one of emergent and varying arrangements of practice and meaning that include complex agencies-agencies that vary across region and time and ones that structure how care and prevention are enacted.Indeed, the text carries readers through a diversity of places and spaces in which HPV knowledge emerges and proliferates and through the ranging population groups' whose subjectivity is interpellated in the HPV-cancer prevention arena.Mamo characterises the emergence of a 'prevention regime' in 21st century biomedicine, which not only enacts prevention as a central priority of medicine, but also one in which individuals perceive and monitor their health in terms of risk and threat and are conditioned to make choices to manage that risk.She contends that this regime was established first through the molecular knowledge of HPV's role in a set of cancers (cervical, anal and oral), leading to the development screening tests (e.g. the Pap test) and later when the Pap was deemed no longer 'good enough', the development of vaccines and novel screening tools.Mamo explicates how different risk groups were called to action to get vaccinated and monitor their risk and how such targeting expanded from group to group, 'subsuming and animating gendered sexual risk along the way' (Mamo 2023, p. 19).A core argument of the text is that the narrative shape of science and technology has consequences for the production of meaning around risk, the conditions in need of prevention and the subjects in need of protection.Mamo traces how marketing campaigns called upon individuals, initially girls and their mothers, to manage the threat of HPV.From the earliest
Source: Sociology of Health & Illness
Author: Melanie Jeske
Institution: Baylor College of Medicine
Language: English
Subfield: Epidemiology
Field: Medicine
Domain: Health Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4402869275