Laura Mamo, <i>Sexualizing Cancer: HPV and the Politics of Cancer Prevention</i> Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2024. Pp. 360. ISBN 978-0-226-82929-6. $35.00 (paper).

In Sexualizing Cancer, Laura Mamo explores the connections among sexuality, gender, vaccines and cancer using lenses from sociology of science.Over nine chapters, she discusses the marketing of the HPV vaccine as a cervical cancer vaccine to young women after its FDA approval in 2006 and the subsequent broadening to other patient groups for anal and oropharyngeal cancers, among others.Her foundational assumption is that the virus and the vaccine are not just material objects, but also social objects.With a nod to Michel Foucault, she claims vaccines are 'biopolitical projects that administer life and death and discipline individuals through the exertion of power' (p.31).Starting with a focus on the selectively sanitized view of HPV that was first presented to the public, Mamo describes the desexualizing promotional campaign by Merck, creator of the Gardasil HPV vaccine, aimed specifically at girls and their parents.Its advertisements empowered girls to choose to protect themselves but in turn diminished their sexual agency by downplaying the sexually transmitted nature of the virus.The second chapter recounts how Gardasil was subsequently approved for boys, creating some conflict between individual and community health ('me medicine' versus 'we medicine'), as cervical cancer cannot develop in people without cervices.Chapter 3 covers how HPV-caused anal cancer and its sexualized victims were often overlooked due to homophobic social stigmas, reminiscent of failures in responding to the HIV epidemic.In Chapter 4, Mamo addresses the debate over the appropriate tool to standardize anal cancer screening.Chapter 5 covers oropharyngeal cancer and its role in the public space as a 'coming epidemic.'The next three chapters address fewer topics and are continuations of a single theme: the sociological effectsin doctors' offices and in the public imaginaryof various cervical cancer screening methods and tools used in the United States.Finally, in Chapter 9, the strongest of the book, Mamo reflects on the global structural inequalities and health disparities that prevent cervical cancer rates from being lowered in low-resource countries.She then summarizes her central arguments about HPV and its prevention being gendered and sexualized by the public, desexualized by advertisers, and overall heavily stigmatized every step of the way.She concludes with a broadly critical view of biomedicine, technology and pharmaceuticals when they enforce consumerism and stigmatize and sexualize certain groups of peopleintentionally or not.However, she concludes, 'Sexualizing cancer is a good thing It is the moralizing, stigmatizing, and exercising jurisdictional control over whose bodies and what forms of sex are deemed good and in need of protection that require averting and preventing' (p.260).