Regulating Latina Youth Sexualities through Community Health Centers

Abstract

This article examines the regulation of Latina youth sexualities in the context of sexual and reproductive health care provision. In-depth interviews with health care providers working in two Latino-serving community health centers are analyzed for how they interpret and respond to the sexual and reproductive practices of their low-income Latina teen patients. The author finds that providers emphasize teenage pregnancy as a social problem among this population to the exclusion of other dimensions of youth sexualities and encourage Latina girls’ adherence to a life course trajectory that conforms to middle-class, heteronormative ideals as a solution to this problem. By relying on such understandings, providers construct meanings of sexual citizenship that require participation in bourgeois heteronormativity. These findings suggest that Latino-serving community health centers, their providers, and their teen patients could benefit from questioning the assumptions that inform providers’ appraisals of Latina youth and developing a more inclusive approach to Latina youth sexualities beyond a discourse of pregnancy prevention. Such efforts could allow community health centers to actively participate in disrupting the structural inequalities that shape their young patients’ lives.

Latina Girls, Sexual Agency, and the Contradictions of Neoliberalism

“…Poor youth and youth of color are often conceptualized as Batrisk^for negative outcomes, including low educational attainment, un(der)employment, criminality, and teenage childbearing; not surprisingly, their burgeoning sexualities are a central dimension of these anxieties. Such constructions facilitate and justify surveillance and intervention (Harris 2004;Kelly 2001), with particular emphasis placed on preventing teenage pregnancy, typically by prioritizing and/or promoting sexual abstinence until marriage (Barcelos 2013;Geronimus 2003;Harden 2014;Luker 1996Luker , 2006Mann 2013;Sisson 2012) and more recently, encouraging the use of long-acting reversible contraceptives (Gubrium et al 2015).…”

“…In addition to critical examinations of these dynamics, feminist scholars have explored and interrogated the discourses and practices that produce or curtail the development of adolescent girls' sexual subjectivities (e.g., Bay-Cheng 2015a;Fine 1988;García 2012;Mann 2013;Martin 1996;Schalet et al 2003;Schalet 2010;Tolman 2002;Zimmer-Gembeck et al 2011). Tolman (2002 defines sexual subjectivity as Ba person's experience of herself as a sexual being, who feels entitled to sexual pleasure and sexual safety, who makes active sexual choices, and who has an identity as a sexual being^(p. 2).…”

“…They also have the highest birth rate among adolescents, ages 15-19 (Kost and Maddow-Zimet 2016). While Latina teen pregnancy and birth rates have declined substantially in recent years, such data continue to receive significant attention in social science and public health scholarship, oftentimes at the expense of other considerations (Geronimus 1997(Geronimus , 2003Gómez et al 2014;Mann 2013;O'Sullivan et al 2006). Feminist scholars have sought to take a broader approach to adolescent girls' sexualities by attending to the perspectives and experiences of young women who are often excluded from positive and normative discourses of sexual development, including Latina youth (Bay-Cheng and Goodkind 2016; Barcelos and Gubrium 2014;Dennison and Russell 2005;García 2012;Gubrium et al 2014;Harden 2014;Russell 2005;Schalet 2011;Tolman and McClelland 2011).…”

Exceptionalism and Sexularism in Finnish Sex Education

“…In addition, other researchers within the field of sex education have emphasised the importance of 'teaching young people to critically engage sexual risk in such a way as to confront social inequalities rather than operate on the idea that sexual risk can be completely eliminated via sex education' (García, 2009, p. 537). Drawing from Emily S. Mann's (2013) research results, it is important to see that, for example, school spaces can have the potential to be important areas where young people's sexual agency and full democratic sexual citizenship are respected. This means that sex education should strive to be more culturally sensitive and aware of the complex structural inequalities that shape young people's lives (see also Moore & Prescott, 2013, p. 199).…”

“…In my research project, of which this article is a part, I combine debates from post-colonial (see, for example, Mulinari et al, 2009) and youth and sexuality research (see, for example, García, 2009;Mann, 2013), and take advantage of previous research that has examined the everyday lives of young people with multicultural backgrounds and conceptualised the different meanings of age, ethnicity, sexuality and gender (see, for example, Phoenix, 2008). The analysis piggybacks interviews conducted with young people aged 13 to 18 (n = 33) and professionals (n = 21), as well as material consisting of 18 health education textbooks used in Finnish upper secondary schools.…”