Distributing Condoms and Hope by Chris A. Barcelos;

Author:Chris A. Barcelos; [Неизв.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780520306707
Publisher: University of California Press

PRODUCING YOUTH SEXUALITY IN MILLERSTON

Social science scholars of sexualities have shaped our understanding of sex and sexuality as not merely natural, biological processes or categories but also forms of socially and politically produced knowledge. This work illustrates how “sexual meanings, identities, and categories [are] intersubjectively negotiated social and historical products—that sexuality [is], in a word, constructed.”5 As Breanne Fahs and Sara McClelland explain, critical sexualities studies is both a subfield of study and a lens, or a “way of looking” at sexuality that attends to the collision of sex and power.6 Critical sexualities scholars have directed our attention to the ways sexuality is not simply an individual private act or identity but also a form of social power that creates meaning and is organized by its intersections with race, class, gender, ability, nation, and so on.7

The notion of sexuality as a discourse that produces individuals, populations, bodies, and fields of study is of course indebted to Foucault, who marked the “incitement to discourse” producing sexuality as an object and technique of knowledge. This sexual incitement to discourse produces a “multiplication of discourses concerning sex in the field of exercise of power itself: an institutional incitement to speak about it, and to do so more and more; a determination on the part of the agencies of power to hear it spoken about, and to cause it to speak through explicit articulation and endless accumulated detail” (emphasis in original).8 Foucault’s “repressive hypothesis” is useful for understanding how youth sexual health promotion manages to obscure sex and sexuality while attempting to change individual behaviors around it. Foucault identifies a paradox in the idea that society has repressed sexuality, particularly since the nineteenth century.9 At the same time that social institutions and actors have been “silent” about sex, they have simultaneously produced it as a core feature of human identity and the subject of ever-expanding discourses.10 Power does not ignore sexuality but rather creates social and political meanings about sex through an incitement to speak about it. In Millerston, this power produced a limited way of understanding sexuality that featured both silence and constant talk about youth sexual behavior. It produced teens as particular kinds of sexual subjects, ones who are always “at risk,” who are devoid of pleasure and desire, who lack agency but at the same time are unconstrained by social inequalities. Although discourses of sexuality produce teen sexual subjectivity as nonagentic, health promotion practice calls upon them to engage in practices of the self, such as abstinence from (presumedly heterosexual) sexual activity or compulsory contraceptive use in the name of decreasing teen pregnancy rates, bolstering the neoliberal state, and creating normative families.

Millerston’s participation in activities for the National Day to Prevent Teen Pregnancy set the stage for elucidating how discourses of sexuality operated in the city. The National Day occurs every year in May during National Teen Pregnancy Prevention Month. The National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy coordinates the National Day, and activities take place in cities and towns across the United States.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.