Suspicion

In 2014, Barbados began offering a vaccine that guards against certain strains of human papillomavirus, with the goal of lowering cervical cancer risk for young women. The disease hits Caribbean women especially hard, yet many Afro-Barbadian parents chose not to have their daughters vaccinated.

Nicole Charles treats this refusal as suspicion rather than hesitancy. Her analysis combines ethnographic fieldwork with black feminist theory, transnational feminist studies, and science and technology studies. She pays close attention to gut feelings and emotion, and to the lasting injuries left by colonial and biopolitical violence. Suspicion, she argues, is not irrational. It is a difficult but productive orientation, rooted in a long history of distrust toward government and in coercive medical practices imposed on colonized populations.

By situating suspicion within these wider cultural and political histories, the book complicates familiar accounts of vaccine hesitancy. It also opens new paths into racialized biopolitics, neocolonialism, care, affect, and biomedicine across the Black diaspora.

The book is the recipient of the Duke University Press Scholars of Color First Book Award.