Medical Research Participation as Citizenship: Modeling Modern Masculinity and Marriage in a Mexican Sexual Health Study

In this article, I discuss people's use of medical research participation to perform and model modernity amid societal insecurity. I analyze data from interviews with heterosexual Mexican couples undertaken throughout men's multiyear participation in a human papillomavirus (HPV) study. I argue that through activities like willingly undergoing genital examination and involving wives in husbands’ clinical visits, spouses used the study as a forum for performing ideals of modern gender and health, specifically companionate marriage and non‐macho masculinities emphasizing male self‐care. They also hoped to serve as role models for their children and for society at large. I discuss how specific elements of the Mexican context made fomenting social change through individual research participation seem possible: cultural narratives of the Mexican populace as a bioculturally homogenous whole; longstanding state efforts to modernize the population away from “traditional” gender and health practices; and ongoing failures of the “slippery State” to reliably provide the resources those practices required. In this context, participants framed themselves as a middle‐class vanguard and experienced sexual health research as an act of citizenship through which they hoped to spur national progress despite state failures and the persistence of antimodern gender and health attitudes. [ medical research, modernity, Mexico, gender, health ]