Crisis Pregnancy and the Colonization of the Clinic

This chapter explores how rhetorics of crisis have reshaped contemporary reproductive politics. First, it examines the significance of crisis teen pregnancy narratives in popular media (e.g., Juno, 16 and Pregnant, Glee, and Teen Mom) and how these narratives manage collective anxieties over abortion, adoption, and teen motherhood. It traces these trends alongside the colonization of comprehensive women’s health clinics by the evangelical crisis pregnancy center movement. The logic of homeland security culture, present in this case study through rhetorics of “crisis,” fuels the differential protection of domestic bodies and works to produce and reproduce national identity through the bodies of particular women and families.

“She is very illusive”: Substance abuse, gender roles and motherhood among the teenage girls of the Sioux Lookout Zone, 1969-1996

From 1969 to 1996, the Indigenous teenage girls of the Sioux Lookout Zone of Northern Ontario grew up surrounded by poverty and rapid societal change. Substance abuse, vandalism, and suicide rates were rising, and families and health care providers were worried about the health of adolescents in their communities.1-3 This paper examines the instances teenage girls were mentioned in the collection of documents about the Sioux Lookout Zone Hospital at the University of Toronto Archives in order to analyze the challenges that these girls faced in gender role negotiations, substance abuse, and teen motherhood.

Identity of Distance: How Economically Marginalized Black and Latina Women Navigate Risk Discourse and Employ Feminist Ideals

Racialized and classed “risk” narratives of sexuality in the United States construct economically marginalized young women of color as sexually precocious, potential teen mothers who are likely to end up as burdens on the state. Some scholars underline the utility of recognizing reproductive inequalities involved in constructing teen motherhood as an unequivocal social problem, and they stress the importance of exploring teen mothers’ agency in navigating dominant risk narratives. Fewer studies analyze how young women who are not pregnant or parenting produce, reproduce, and challenge dominant risk narratives about their sexuality. Drawing on three years of intensive fieldwork among 13 young economically marginalized black and Latina women, I demonstrate how feminist ideologies of empowerment interact with pervasive risk narratives in the everyday lives of marginalized women coming of age in the “shadow of the women’s movement.” My observations show that the young women strategically navigate circulating risk narratives about their sexuality by constructing an identity of distance characterized by feminist ideals of independence, self-respect, and self-development to distance themselves from these narratives. However, as they construct this identity of distance, they also stigmatize young mothers and police their own bodies and the bodies of their friends and sisters. I draw on women-of-color feminism to reflect on the uncomfortable relationship—evident in the process of a group of young women’s identity construction—between feminist ideologies of empowerment and bourgeois heteronormativity that marginalizes young women’s sexualities by constructing teen motherhood as inherently problematic.