Overview

The virus that changed how we think about cancer and its culprits—and the vaccine that changed how we talk about sex and its risks.   Starting in 2005, people in the US and Europe were inundated with media coverage announcing the link between cervical cancer and the sexually transmitted virus HPV. Within a year, product ads promoted a vaccine targeting cancer’s viral cause, and girls and women became early consumers of this new cancer vaccine. The knowledge of HPV’s broadening association with other cancers followed, which identified new at-risk populations—namely boys and men—and ignited a plethora of gendered and sexual issues related to cancer prevention.   Sexualizing Cancer is the first book dedicated to the emergence and proliferation of the HPV vaccine along with the medical capacity to screen for HPV—crucial landmarks in the cancer prevention arsenal based on a novel connection between sex and chronic disease. Interweaving accounts from the realms of biomedical science, public health, and social justice, Laura Mamo chronicles cervical cancer’s path out of exam rooms and into public discourse. She shows how the late twentieth-century scientific breakthrough that identified the human papilloma virus as having a causative role in the onset of human cancer ignited sexual politics, struggles for inclusion, new risk identities, and, ultimately, a new regime of cancer prevention. Mamo reveals how gender and other equity arguments from within scientific, medical, and advocate communities shaped vaccine guidelines, clinical trial funding, research practices, and clinical programs, with consequences that reverberate today. This is a must-read history of medical expansion—from a “woman’s disease” to a set of cancers that affect all genders—and of lingering sexualization, with specific gendered, racialized, and other contours along the way.

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9780226829296

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Reviews

“An engaging, informative, and exceptionally erudite effort to explicate and analyze the complex, decades-long intertwining of HPV, cancer, gender, and sexuality. Sexualizing Cancer will be a welcome resource for scholars, clinicians, and policymakers.” -- Laura M. Carpenter, Vanderbilt University “Mamo has put together an exciting and lively read, highlighting historically through to the present day the many ways in which assumptions about gender and sexuality underpin much of public health decision making. With a focus on HPV, she sets out an extremely compelling and well written narrative that places current debates within their larger economic, social, cultural, and political contexts. Weaving together the local and the global, she ultimately asks us to query how our own assumptions about gender, sexuality, race, and class impact how we read and understand public health, and the social connections and actions we take.” -- Sofia Gruskin, University of Southern California

An engaging, informative, and exceptionally erudite effort to explicate and analyze the complex, decades-long intertwining of HPV, cancer, gender, and sexuality. Sexualizing Cancer will be a welcome resource for scholars, clinicians, and policymakers. -- Laura M. Carpenter, Vanderbilt University

Author Information

Laura Mamo is professor in the Health Equity Institute at San Francisco State University. She is the author of Queering Reproduction: Achieving Pregnancy in the Age of Technoscience, coauthor of Living Green: Communities that Sustain, and coeditor of Biomedicalization Studies: Technoscience and Transformations of Health, Illness, and U.S. Biomedicine.

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