The cancer of women

Laura Mamo is Health Equity Professor of Public Health at the San Francisco State University, San Francisco, CA, USA. Her work sits at the intersection of medical sociology and gender and cultural studies of science, technology, and medicine. Sexualising Cancer: HPV and the Politics of Cancer Prevention is her latest work, and encompasses seven years of research into the “multifaceted” cultural and political forces that have shaped the discourse around human papillomavirus as a sexually-transmitted infection (STI) and its link to cancer—namely, cervical cancer. In Mamo's own words, “Sexualising Cancer follows human papillomavirus (HPV) knowledge backward and forward, examining the particular ways sex and cancer intertwine”.