Latina Girls, Sexual Agency, and the Contradictions of Neoliberalism

Abstract

This article contributes to the literature on adolescent girls' sexual subjectivities using individual interviews conducted with 30 working-class, Latina teenagers. Latina girls' accounts of their experiences with sexual debut, current sexual relationships, and sexual abstinence reveal that they construct sexual subjectivities through multiple forms of sexual agency; however, for some, the absence of sexual agency remains an enduring feature of their sexual experiences. The findings illustrate the contradictions embedded in Latina girls' narratives of sexual agency whereby they often draw on dominant discourses of neoliberalism, heterosexuality, and traditional gender ideology as rhetorical strategies by which to legitimize their sexual decision-making and resist their subjectification as Bat-risk^girls. The uptake of these discourses in the narratives of those marginalized at the intersections of gender, race, and class demonstrate the salience of neoliberalism as a form of disciplinary power and have implications for ongoing efforts to foster positive adolescent sexual development.

A Qualitative Analysis of Beliefs About Sexual Consent Among High School Students

“…There is a paucity of research on sexual consent among high school–age adolescents compared with the research on college-age populations. However, fostering an understanding of sexual consent among high school students may be especially important in light of findings that sexual assertiveness (Rickert, Sanghvi, & Wiemann, 2002), self-efficacy for condom use (Teitelman, Ratcliffe, Morales-Aleman, & Sullivan, 2008), and sexual agency (Mann, 2016) are often absent from the sexual experiences of adolescent girls. Furthermore, as adolescents often lack the skills to refuse peer pressure to engage in health risk behavior, such as alcohol use (Salvy, Pedersen, Miles, Tucker, & D’Amico, 2014; Scheier, Botvin, Diaz, & Griffin, 1999), many school-based substance use prevention programs explicitly teach verbal and nonverbal skills that adolescents can use to communicate their desires (Botvin & Griffin, 2007).…”

Agency‐Without‐Choice: The Visual Rhetorics of Long‐Acting Reversible Contraception Promotion

“…Finally, as our work was expressly driven by a symbolic interactionist (SI) frame and influenced by the interactionist‐inflected work of feminist STS scholars and medical sociologists (e.g., Clarke ), we suggest that our analysis contributes to a growing body of SI work that exposes the cultural forms and consequences of neoliberalism (Elliott ; Grzanka and Maher ; Grzanka and Mann ; Mann ). As opposed to studies of neoliberalism that target policies themselves, our work points to the ways that neoliberal ideology functions representationally and may contribute to what Foucault () called governmentality, whereby norms are internalized and practiced through self‐monitoring and self‐discipline.…”

“…LARC can also be situated in the context of contemporary neoliberalism, or neoliberalization, in which the conceptual and material boundaries between private and public are subverted and market forces and late‐capitalist logics manifest in virtually all aspects of society, including sexual and reproductive health (Grzanka, Mann, and Elliott ). Researchers have exposed how neoliberal tropes of self‐cultivation, entrepreneurship, and personal responsibility have inflected a range of seemingly disparate domains of sexuality and reproduction, including sex education (Elliott ), sexual assault and unwanted sex (Bay‐Cheng and Eliseo‐Arras ), vaccination politics (Mamo and Epstein ; Reich ), teenage sexualities (Bay‐Cheng ; Elliott ; Mann , ), and mental health promotion (Grzanka and Mann ). Across these sites, neoliberal ideology emerges as a social imperative for subjects to cultivate responsible sexual identities and practices—whereby responsibility is defined in terms of independence from social welfare systems and by adherence to traditional notions of monogamous heterosexuality (i.e., heteronormativity) that reflect the dominant interests of the advanced capitalist state.…”

The Role of Dispositional and Social Factors in Argentinian and Spanish Women’s Sexuality

“…However, the weight of these variables on women's sexuality is still unknown (Apostolou, 2016). This is particularly true when this analysis focuses on the sexuality of women who have been socialized in sexually conservative traditions such as the Hispanic culture (Mann, 2016).…”