Palimpsestic Refusals: Vaccination and Felt Protection in Barbados

• In Event: Sensing Beyond Borders

Abstract

This paper explores how Barbadian parents use the language of pain and force to respond to the Barbadian Ministry of Health’s intensive promotion of the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine. Barbadian parents’ suspicion toward the HPV vaccine, I argue, ought to be understood as informed by the postcolonial state’s contemporary immersion in increasingly technological global (bio)political assemblages, and too, by a shifting and cumulative historical set of practices of violence, surveillance, policing and control of black women’s sexuality, their health and reproduction in the name of capital accumulation – practices which Afro-Barbadian mothers sense, and respond to via suspicion. Taking up women of colour and transnational feminist theories of enfleshment, embodied knowledge and futurity, I argue for parents’ experience of suspicion as sensed in and through the body, the gut and the flesh, which in turn constitute a knowledge of protection and refusal that might not only be thought of as form of resistance, but an embodied palimpsestic response to histories of colonial and postcolonial violence. This work engages STS debates on scientific knowledge-making and citizen-society knowledges of health, while further exploring how affects of sensibility and suspicion attach themselves to sites of science, biomedicine, and new biotechnologies. In so doing, it expands boundaries of what we consider both sensible and ethical societal responses to public health in the context of transnational bioeconomies, and racialized and (post)colonial biopolitics

Author

• Nicole Charles, University of Toronto