Laura M. Carpenter

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

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

A Tale of Two Technologies HPV Vaccination, Male Circumcision, and Sexual Health

This article brings insights from feminist science and technology studies to bear on recent public debates over the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine, which prevents many cervical cancers, and male circumcision as potential HIV preventive. In the United States, attempts to mandate HPV vaccination have activated intense concerns about female “promiscuity,” whereas talk of promoting circumcision against HIV has triggered scant anxiety about American boys’ sexuality. The authors show how intersections among gender, sexuality, race, and age have shaped responses to these two containment technologies—and how the technologies’ deployment both relies on and reproduces meanings of gender and sexuality that constitute the omnipresent “double standard.” The analysis develops an original feminist sociology of containment, explicating how social relations shape the innovation, reinvention, and use of technologies to contain particular sorts of bodies, fluids, and sexual practices—by whom, under what conditions, and for what purposes.

Toward a Social Science of Sexual Satisfaction: Commentary on “Virginity Lost, Satisfaction Gained? Physiological and Psychological Sexual Satisfaction at Heterosexual Debut”

Higgins, Trussell, Moore, and Davidson (2010) expand our understanding of sexual satisfaction by showing that first vaginal sex is more likely to be psychologically than physically satisfying and by revealing differences between women and men and similarities between African Americans and Whites. Their analyses highlight the need for further theory-building, explicating the dynamics of change over time, integrating qualitative and quantitative approaches, and articulating implications for public policy. These are crucial steps toward developing a social science of sexual satisfaction. More research that focuses on positive aspects of sexuality, such as satisfaction, should be encouraged.

Studying Sexualities from a Life Course Perspective

This chapter overviews theory and research on sexual beliefs, behaviors, and identities over the life course. Following a brief history of the life course perspective on sexualities, the author outlines a conceptual framework for studying gendered sexualities from birth to death. Next, she evaluates a wide range of methods suitable for research in this area and discusses in depth exemplary recent studies focusing on different stages of the life course (e.g., adolescence, midlife, old age), the development of sexual identity and orientation, and specific experiences (e.g., parenthood, military service), paying particular attention to the ways gender, race, ethnicity, social class, and sexual orientation intersect to shape the life course. The chapter concludes by proposing critical areas for future research, including seldom-examined life stages (e.g., childhood, very old age), links across multiple life stages, pleasure and desire, transgender and intersex, sexual subcultures, physical and mental illness, disabilities, and contexts other than wealthy, post-industrial nations.

Botox Nation: Changing the Face of America:

‘‘forces’’ between a cause (e.g., income distribution) and outcome (e.g., development). In a particular instantiation of a causal relation (say income distribution and development in South Korea between 1953 and 1979), income distribution is either a causal factor that leads to development or it is not. However, every case is defined with respect to abstract categories such as income distribution and development, which inevitably refer to an implicit universe of cases. Accordingly, the binary contrast that Beach and Pedersen establish between their version of ontological determinism and ontological probabilism is likely to be contested. One can argue that a probabilistic view of the world is entirely consistent with a deterministic understanding of particular events and outcomes, simply because all probabilism suggests is that there is variation in the chain of actions, events, and structural properties linking a cause with outcomes in a universe of cases. Causal Case Study Methods builds on the idea that the mechanisms linking a cause and outcome can be specified without reference to the variation in those mechanisms observed in the actual world. Paradoxically, that is possible only with a viewpoint akin to Hempel’s (1966) covering laws. In addressing these issues, the authors would have benefited from Salmon’s arguments on how causal explanation of a particular outcome is twotiered; how it inevitably embodies both constitutive and etiological arguments; thus, how causal explanation of a particular outcome involves mechanisms that combine general regularities about human behavior and the temporal ordering of particular conditions (1984: 22, 240, 261–273). However, the difficult issues that Causal Case Study Methods raises and the positions the authors take are not a hindrance to benefiting from this ambitious book. To the contrary, the book is thought-provoking precisely because Beach and Pedersen meticulously carry their philosophical arguments to their logical conclusions.

Book Review: Not Under My Roof: Parents, Teens, and the Culture of Sex

The contrast is striking: Almost every Dutch parent Amy Schalet interviewed for Not Under My Roof said they would consider permitting, or had already permitted, their teenage son or daughter to spend the night with a girlfriend or boyfriend, whereas few of their American counterparts could even imagine doing so. Both groups of parents were white, middleclass, and either secular or moderately Christian. Both had been raised with relatively conservative sexual values before experiencing the sexual “revolution” of the late 1960s. The United States and the Netherlands are both decentralized republics with highly advanced economies and Protestant majorities. Why, then, these dramatically different approaches to adolescent sexuality? As Schalet argues in her engaging and informative monograph, much of the answer lies in the cultural context of the two societies. Sleepovers make perfect sense in one universe of cultural meanings, but are virtually unthinkable in the other. America’s more intense and conservative religiosity and the Dutch state’s economic safety net also play important roles. These differences carry enormous practical consequences. Although, on average, teens in both countries become (hetero)sexually active at about the same ages, sexually transmitted infections, unintended pregnancy, and abortion are far more common among U.S. teens. Dutch youth use more effective contraceptives more consistently, not least because subsidized health services and comprehensive, sex-positive sex education have made birth control (and abortion) “practically and conceptually” accessible. Not Under My Roof is illustrated with rich examples from Schalet’s interviews with 32 teenage boys, 40 teenage girls, and 58 parents or couples. They came from two medium-sized Dutch cities, a medium-sized Northern California city, a small Pacific Northwest town, and a New England suburb, all chosen to reflect the “moderate middle.” According to Schalet, Dutch parents normalize adolescent sexuality, believing that teens can have real, if typically short-lived, love relationships