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Short abstract:

This proposal focuses on some implications around HPV diagnosis for Mexican cisgender women in Mexico City. It is highlighted how gynecological consultation represents a violent space for women where heteropatriarchal understandings of bodies and disease are relevant.

Long abstract:

In the early 1980s, biomedical research linked the transmission of Human Papillomavirus (HPV) to anal, oral and vaginal sex and genital-to-genital contact. The term HPV describes a cluster of viruses causing various types of cancer, including cervical cancer, one of the leading causes of death among cisgender women in their 20s and 30s in the global South. Through screening, HPV can be readily identified and treated to prevent the progression of disease to cancer. In countries from the global South, such as Mexico, cervical cancer represents the first cause of death among the ones between their 20-40’s. Therefore, technoscientific advances to both prevent and treat the human papillomavirus (HPV).

Biomedical interventions in Mexico (such as vaccines and Papanicolaou) are available only for cisgender women, which reifies understandings of heteronormativity, unequal development and implementation. These reifying processes are influenced by the complex neocolonial narratives embedded in how biomedical interventions travel (Echeverría 2008), where the gynecological consultation space emerge as a setting that enables inequalities for cisgender women. From an intersectional perspective that takes into account the ways gender, sexual orientation, age and social class interact, I highlight in this proposal how biomedical knowledge is translated into power relationships forces for women that are not related to biological information about viruses, cancer and biomedical interventions. This proposal also queries how feminist activism represents a way to face biomedical power by constructing phenomenological alternatives to understand an experience HPV diagnosis.