Love Alone Won’t Protect Your Daughter: The HPV Vaccine and Maternal Responsibility

• In Event: 472 - Regular Session. Technology

Abstract

Looking within Ontario, this research asks what a vaccine against a sexually transmitted infection tells us about gendered logics and practices of motherhood. How are mothers discursively implicated as actors responsible for their daughter’s health and sexual health, and how do mothers take this responsibility on in their everyday lives? In Ontario, parents of 8th Grade girls must decide whether or not to vaccinate their daughters against the Human Papillomavirus (HPV) when schools ask for their consent to vaccinate their daughters – a decision that usually falls to mothers. Focusing on the HPV vaccine, I analyze how mothers narrate their decision to vaccinate their daughters to understand how they manage their responsibility as a mother in terms of caring for their teen daughters’ current and future sexual health. I find that parents’ narratives on the HPV vaccine decision reinforce gendered logics of maternal responsibility. I argue that the routinized way the vaccine decision enters into the everyday life of mothers situates the vaccine as their responsibility and reinforces the gendered division of labour and childcare.

Author

• Katelin Elizabeth Albert, University of Toronto