HPV Vaccination and Affective Suspicions in Barbados

Abstract

Responding to the Editors' call to queer both analyses of contagion and the modes of knowledge production that contagion might enliven, this article offers women of color, Black, and transnational feminist perspectives as provocations to unsettle the biomedical conception of vaccine hesitancy that is often deemed an unsettling, undesirable threat to the protection of society. Drawing upon seven months of ethnographic research in Barbados between 2015 and 2016, I critically reframe Barbadian parents' hesitancy toward the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine as an affective intensity of suspicion. Utilizing transnational feminist methodologies to trace the cross-temporal resonances of this affect, I amplify the challenges suspicion offers to the term "vaccine hesitancy," and gesture to the generative epistemologies and claims to knowledge that this contagious affect promises both for Barbadian parents and feminist (techno)science studies scholars alike.

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