AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST RESEARCH ARTICLE Medical Research Participation as Citizenship: Modeling Modern Masculinity and Marriage in a Mexican Sexual Health Study Emily Wentzell ABSTRACT 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] RESUMEN En este art´ ıculo, discuto el uso de la participaci ´ on en investigaci ´ on m ´ edica por individuos para represen- tar y modelar la modernidad en medio de la inseguridad social. Analizo la informaci ´ on de las entrevistas con parejas heterosexuales mexicanas llevadas a cabo a lo largo de la participaci ´ on de hombres en un estudio del virus del papiloma humano (VPH) durante varios a ˜ nos. Argumento que a trav ´ es de actividades como tomar voluntariamente un examen genital e involucrar las esposas en las vistas cl´ ınicas de sus esposos, los esposos usaron el estudio como un foro para representar los ideales modernos de g ´ enero y salud, especialmente el matrimonio de compa ˜ nerismo y masculinidades no machistas enfatizando el autocuidado masculino. Ellos tambi ´ en esperaban servir como modelos para sus hijos y para la sociedad en general. Discuto c ´ omo elementos espec´ ıficos del contexto mexicano hicieron el fomentar el cambio social a trav ´ es de la participaci ´ on individual en investigaci ´ on parecer posible: las narrativas culturales del pueblo mexicano como un todo homog ´ eneo bioculturalmente; los esfuerzos estatales de larga data para modernizar la poblaci ´ on alej ´ andose de las pr ´ acticas de g ´ enero y salud “tradicionales”; y fallas continuas del “estado inestable”, para confiablemente proveer los recursos que esas pr ´ acticas requirieron. En este contexto, los participantes se enmarcaron a s´ ı mismos como vanguardia de clase media y vivieron la investigaci ´ on de salud sexual como un acto de ciudadan´ ıa a trav ´ es de la cual esperaron estimular el progreso nacional a pesar de las fallas del AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST, Vol. 000, No. 0, pp. 1–13, ISSN 0002-7294, online ISSN 1548-1433. C  2015 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/aman.12335