What is it about This Place? Constructing Race in Youth Sexual Health Promotion

• In Event: 324 - Regular Session. Race, Class, and Gender

Abstract

This paper uses ethnographic and archival methods to understand how ways of knowing about youth sexuality influence community health work. Youth sexual health promotion is a lens through which to view our cultural anxieties about unrestrained female sexuality, failure to adhere to white, middle-class childbearing norms, and an out of control welfare state. Because youth sexual health work is always already about teen pregnancy, and teen pregnancy is always already about race, I utilize a case study of a racialized Northeastern city that sustains a reputation as a place of hyperfertile young Latinas. “Stockton” is a post-industrial city widely known as a community with a large Puerto Rican population, the state’s highest teen birth rate and high levels of poverty, school dropout, unemployement, substance abuse, and violence. I collected data in multiple ways: participant observation at committee meetings, conferences, and community events; key informant interviews with policymakers, educators, and service providers; and collection of a wide range of documents, both historical and current. Analysis followed Adele Clarke’s “situational analysis” method and highlights the “situation” of youth sexual health promotion in Stockton, or what I call the “teen pregnancy prevention industrial complex.” I begin by providing a history of the city that focuses on colonialism, industry, migration patterns, and shifting racial composition. I trace how historical discourses of sexuality and reproduction in Puerto Rico inform present day understandings in Stockton. Finally, I sketch a portrait of how teen pregnancy prevention became industrialized in Stockton and how stakeholders understand their work.

Author

• Chris A. Barcelos, University of Massachusetts Amherst