Is it Worth the shot? Ontario Women's Negotiations of Risk, Gender and the Human Papillomavirous(HPV) Vaccine

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dc.contributor.advisorAdelson, Naomi
dc.creatorWyndham-West, Catherine Michelle
dc.date.accessioned2014-07-17T14:57:28Z
dc.date.available2014-07-17T14:57:28Z
dc.date.copyright2014-04-07
dc.date.issued2014-07-09
dc.date.updated2014-07-09T17:10:08Z
dc.degree.disciplineSocial Anthropology
dc.degree.levelDoctoral
dc.degree.namePhD - Doctor of Philosophy
dc.description.abstractThis research project has been an endeavor in understanding how Human Papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine policy became gendered in Canada, how women in Ontario negotiated the concepts of “risk” and “gender” deployed in pharmaceutical marketing and public health programming, and how they folded these mediations into decision making about the vaccine. Eighteen months of ethnographic fieldwork revealed that the federal and Ontario governments developed HPV vaccine policy by using gender based analyses frames, based on the parameters of Merck Frosst’s gender-based marketing. This case study of the HPV vaccine highlights how corporations and governments work hand and hand to set public health policy in the neoliberal era of public health. However, these sales/governance strategies and the gendered at-risk subject formation they created and circulated were not passively integrated by women into their daily lives. The women interviewed – mothers of daughters affected by the grade eight school vaccination program, women university students and patients at a hospital vaccine clinic – demonstrated that the concepts of “risk” and “gender” are productive and movable ontological modes of being, which shift in and out of focus depending upon the context. Mothers were intensely focused on gender and doing mothering, students were doing gender politics and intermittent risk, and patients were living with risk. What sales/governance strategies had tried to “fix,” women continually unfixed. These accounts of situated risk and gender demonstrated that when assembled, women’s experiences helped transform their ethical being or sense of self. This knowledge of the self then informed vaccination decisions. Thus, decision making was not a discrete event or a linear, cost-benefit analysis. Instead it was an inherently social and cultural process, which was embedded in women’s experiences of finding meaning in their efforts to be good mothers, strong young women emerging into adulthood and pre-cancerous patients seeking respite amid the anxiety of protracted medical procedures. Women’s ontological decision making provides an analytical framework through which to tie together risk- and gender-related theory, individual accounts of risk encounters and the social, political, historical and economic context in which these mediations occur.en_US
dc.identifier.urihttp://hdl.handle.net/10315/27674
dc.language.isoenen_US
dc.rightsAuthor owns copyright, except where explicitly noted. Please contact the author directly with licensing requests.
dc.subjectCultural anthropologyen_US
dc.subjectGender studiesen_US
dc.subjectPublic healthen_US
dc.subject.keywordsParticipatory methodologiesen_US
dc.subject.keywordsMedical anthropologyen_US
dc.subject.keywordsAnthropology of policyen_US
dc.subject.keywordsPublic healthen_US
dc.subject.keywordsGenderen_US
dc.subject.keywordsEmerging health technologiesen_US
dc.subject.keywordsSexual healthen_US
dc.subject.keywordsCanceren_US
dc.subject.keywordsHPV vaccineen_US
dc.subject.keywordsImmunizationen_US
dc.subject.keywordsRisk and bio-politicsen_US
dc.subject.keywordsQualitative researchen_US
dc.subject.keywordsNarrative researchen_US
dc.titleIs it Worth the shot? Ontario Women's Negotiations of Risk, Gender and the Human Papillomavirous(HPV) Vaccineen_US
dc.typeElectronic Thesis or Dissertation

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