Saving the Girls: Medical Colonialism and the HPV Programme

ABSTRACT

Mass immunisation is a central aspiration of global health programmes, such as in the 2000 Millennium Development Goals (MDG), as a means of addressing the glaring inequalities in life expectancy that separate the Global North and South. A recent initiative, the Human Papillomaviruses (HPV) vaccine, is being rolled out in so-called developing countries to prevent a number of sexually transmitted diseases, including one of the rarer forms of cervical cancer. Despite its apparent good intentions, resistance to the vaccine has occurred, in developed as well as in developing countries, not least because it constitutes a largely gendered form of medical intervention which is promoted according to Western concepts of risk, biomedical knowledge and normative understandings of female sexual behaviour. As a major component of the MDG health strategy aimed at developing countries, the HPV vaccine initiative carries implicit tendencies towards ‘medical colonialism’ underpinned as it is by hegemonic scientific masculinity, in which gendered forms of structural violence are legitimised through the discursive affiliations of progress and global health. This paper will examine the intersecting themes of political economy, gendered structural violence and hegemonic medical masculinity underpinning HPV immunisation programmes within the context of development. It interrogates how masculine scientific narratives of disease prevention, which legitimises the state-endorsed (and increasingly mandated) pharmaceuticalised protection of young women as objects of patriarchal care and control, have become the new missionary voices, saving bodies rather than souls.     

What’s in a Name? Beyond The Mary Watson Stories to a Historical Archaeology of Lizard Island

Preliminary historical archaeological research on Lizard Island in far north Queensland is enabling the Queensland Government to develop more effective management strategies for on-site interpretation of the historical precinct of Watsons Bay. Although popularly associated with the north Queensland colonial heroine Mary Watson, the Bay can now be understood as a large multilayered cultural landscape with meaning to a wide variety of groups. The common aspects of the three known beche-de-mer operations that occupied the Bay between 1860 and 1881 and the nature of the emerging archaeological record afford many opportunities for scaled archaeological research. It further highlights aspects of historical archaeological theory and the relationship between the discipline and the historical record.     

Sustaining the energy: a celebration of the life of Judith Ennew

In October 2013 the world lost one of the leading lights of scholarship and advocacy for the human rights of children. Judith Ennew was an intellectual and an activist who shaped the global agenda for research with children, particularly in the Global South, for almost four decades. Judith was also a mentor and friend to many child researchers around the world. Here, we celebrate the incredible life of Judith Ennew as we remember the breadth and depth of her contribution to research and her unfailing commitment to improving the lives of children around the world.     

Trajectories of Memory: Documentary Film and the Transmission of Testimony

The author argues that in the burgeoning new literature about social memory anthropologists have not yet contributed all that they might. In particular, little has been written from an anthropological point of view about memory and film. The article seeks to examine the possible roles of documentary film in memory transmission. During the twentieth century, film and video became increasingly important vehicles of memory, while the digital revolution has made video such a pervasive medium in the new century that it will become more and more vital as a source of historical evidence and reflection. While the evidence presented by visually recorded interviews certainly requires critical evaluation, there is no reason to suppose that recorded interviews are any less reliable than texts; they may in fact offer clues that a text cannot. Some of the most interesting films of memory are the work of independent filmmakers engaged in a courageous personal quest to break officially imposed silences. The article examines the potential of film to preserve memories as trace—that is, as a form of historical evidence; as event—testifying itself being a performative act which generates its own meanings and demands a dialogical engagement with/by an audience; and as trajectory—for individual memories must be transmitted in order to become social. As they are launched into the flow of collective memory, they have a chance to endure over time, multiplying available perspectives on the past. Films of memory are thus part of the struggle against the forgetting of past injustices, and ultimately have the potential to contribute to shifts in our interpretations of history.