Locating Purity within Corruption Rumors: Narratives of HPV Vaccination Refusal in a Peri-urban Community of Southern Romania

Abstract

This article locates the symbolic construction of “corrupted purity”—as a key assertion in Romanian parents’ HPV vaccination refusal narratives—within a multiplicity of entangled rumors concerning reproduction and the state. Romania’s unsuccessful HPV vaccination campaign is not unique. However, the shifting discourses around purity and corruption—through which some parents conveyed anxieties about their daughters being targeted for the vaccine—place a particular twist on the Romanian case of resisting the HPV vaccination. Parental discourses took the form of clusters of rumors about state medicine’s failure to provide adequate reproductive health care, additive-laden foods, and exposure to radioactive contamination. In these rumors, corruption becomes literally embodied, through ingestion, consumption, contact, or inoculation. Parental discourses about what is being injected into their daughters’ pristine bodies express their uncertainty around navigating the unsettled post-socialist medical landscape.