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List of contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction: This Is What Happens When You Get Pregnant as a Teenager
1. Race, Pregnancy, and Power in Millerston
2. The Messy Narratives of Disidentifying with Teen Motherhood
3. "It's their culture": Youth Sexual Health Promotion as a Gendered Racial Project
4. Sex, Science, and What Teens Do When It’s Dark Outside
5. Educated Hope: Imagining Reproductive Justice in Millerston
Appendix A. Organizations and Projects in Millerston
Appendix B. Methodological Notes
Notes
References
Index
About the author
Chris A. Barcelos is Assistant Professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston.
Summary
Distributing Condoms and Hope is a feminist ethnographic account of how youth sexual health programs in the racially and economically stratified city of “Millerston” reproduce harm in the marginalized communities they are meant to serve.
Chris A. Barcelos makes space for the stories of young mothers, who often recognize the narrow ways that public health professionals respond to pregnancies. Barcelos's findings show that teachers, social workers, and nurses ignore systemic issues of race, class, and gender and instead advocate for individual-level solutions such as distributing condoms and promoting "hope." Through a lens of reproductive justice, Distributing Condoms and Hope imagines a different approach to serving marginalized youth—a support system that neither uses their lives as a basis for disciplinary public policies nor romanticizes their struggles.
