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Latina Girls, Sexual Agency, and the Contradictions of Neoliberalism

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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 “at-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.

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Notes

  1. In Spanish, words ending in “o” are understood to be masculine and words ending in “a” are understood to be feminine. “Latino” is a masculine word but nonetheless is often used to refer to all people residing in the USA who have origins in Latin America and/or the Hispanophone Caribbean, regardless of gender. In order to mediate the sexism endemic to using the masculine referent for all Latinxs, some writers began using either Latina/o or Latin@ (since the @ looks like both the o + a together); however, this word still reifies a male/female gender binary. In the past 2 years, writers have begun using “Latinxs” and “Latinx” to signal an inclusive, non-binary/gender neutral approach to human diversity (Saunders 2016). In this article, the “x” is used when referring to Latinxs in general and “Latina” and “Latinas” are used when referring to the study population, all of whom identified as female at the time of data collection.

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Acknowledgments

The data used in this article were collected as part of a larger study supported by a grant from the Ford Foundation and conducted under the direction of the principal investigator, Cynthia A. Gómez, PhD. Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study. The author wishes to thank the anonymous reviewers for their constructive feedback as well as all those who made the research possible, including the participants who generously shared their experiences and perspectives.

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  1. Department of Health Promotion, Education and Behavior, Arnold School of Public Health, University of South Carolina, Columbia, USA

    Emily S. Mann

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This research was funded by a grant from the Ford Foundation.

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Mann, E.S. Latina Girls, Sexual Agency, and the Contradictions of Neoliberalism. Sex Res Soc Policy 13, 330–340 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13178-016-0237-x

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