When the vaccine enters school

the senses of parental care versus the HPV vaccine

Abstract

The present study is the result of an ethnographic study on HPV vaccination, carried out at a public school in the Federal District. The objective of this research is to know the social world that involved the vaccine within the school, from the construction that the actors involved - mothers and fathers, girls and boys - did or had on HPV vaccination. Vaccines have been, I would say historically, a source of prevention, of strengthening the body. But as an appropriate process, both by the State and by the human being, it suffered and undergoes various types of interpretations and appropriations, extrapolating the biomedical world and gaining different social and cultural outlines. All of this relies on several positions, whether with the body itself, towards the family, with the institutional powers. When we are faced with a vaccine that has recently arrived in Brazil, carried out only on very young female bodies, those still represented by their fathers and mothers, and receiving the dose outside their "natural" jurisdictional field - the medical units - within an educational institution, this vaccine context becomes even more interesting. It is about the trajectory of the HPV vaccine, the logic of care in vaccinating a daughter or not, and what theoretical triggers are used to support this decision that this research has considered.