Mediating healthy female citizenship in the HPV vaccination campaigns

Analyzing the HPV awareness and Gardasilw vaccine campaigns for the United States (US), we argue that the campaigns reflect “the new public health” model that positions individuals as neoliberal citizens responsible for managing their health and maximizing public health opportunities. The campaigns, directed primarily at girls and young women and their mothers, also mobilized neoliberal discourses of risk, choice, and self-management alongside postfeminist political rhetoric that values empowerment, freedom, choice, and rights. Postfeminist tropes were co-opted by Merck’s marketing imperatives in order to produce girls and young women as an agentic, niche market of health consumers. We then foreground a low-budget counter-narrative alternative media campaign produced by young women and disseminated through YouTube. This campaign demonstrates the role of new media in producing alternative perspectives on agentic female citizenship and disrupts Merck’s campaign imperatives.