From Desire to Disease: Human Papillomavirus (HPV) and the Medicalization of Nascent Female Sexuality
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article critically examines the proliferation of information on the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccination as integral to contemporary processes of medicalization that take the young female body and her nascent sexuality as its primary object and target. We suggest that the recent introduction of voluntary HPV vaccination for girls, in North America and elsewhere, constitutes a form of neomedicalization (Batt & Lippman, 2010 ) that links risks for future disease (cervical cancer) with the transmission of a common, sexually transmitted infection (HPV). Informed by findings from a critical discourse analysis of Canadian English newspapers, magazines, and public information about HPV vaccination, our interest is on how the emergence of sexual relationships becomes constructed as a time fraught with risks to future health, and that must be managed through biotechnological intervention (vaccination). We suggest that this configuration of medicalization, rather than demarcate a new category of abnormality that can be treated with pharmaceutical or medical intervention, positions the emergence of sexuality itself as the basis of risk and pathologization. The article concludes by considering the implications of this form of medicalization for constructions of female sexuality and sexual health education.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.031 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".