Chris A. Barcelos, "Distributing Condoms and Hope: The Racialized Politics of Youth Sexual Health" (U California Press, 2020)
Distributing Condoms and Hope: The Racialized Politics of Youth Sexual Health\xa0(U California Press, 2020) is a feminist ethnographic account of how youth sexual health programs in the racially and economically stratified city of \u201cMillerston\u201d reproduce harm in the marginalized communities they are meant to serve.\nChris Barcelos makes space for the stories of young mothers, who often recognize the narrow ways that public health professionals respond to pregnancies. Barcelos\u2019s 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,\xa0Distributing Condoms and Hope\xa0imagines a different approach to serving marginalized youth\u2014a support system that neither uses their lives as a basis for disciplinary public policies nor romanticizes their struggles.\nIn our interview, Chris Barcelos explains how they use the framework of a \u201cteen pregnancy prevention industrial complex\u201d to illuminate the webs of power that ultimately serve to perpetuate the systemic social inequities leading to teen pregnancy. They describe the concept of \u201cmessiness\u201d as it applies to deviations from social normativity, and how such deviations \u201cmess up\u201d society\u2019s ideas of what is right and normal.\xa0Distributing Condoms and Hope\xa0forthrightly engages with messiness. One hopes it will have a real-world impact \u2013 for, as Barcelos observes, \u201cIt is easy to critique social structures while nonetheless continuing on with your day-to-day work in ways that do not incorporate those critiques.\u201d\nRachel Pagones teaches preventive medicine and public health in the doctoral program in acupuncture and Chinese medicine at Pacific College of Health and Science in San Diego, and she is a licensed acupuncturist. Her book about acupuncture as a tool of medical, social, and political revolution in the United States will be published later this year.\nLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices\nSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies