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Chapter 5 The State and Sexualities It was a hot day in June around the time the flamboyant trees bloom and show their bright red flowers. Natie and I had moved our metal folding chairs under the tree for shade. Before we began our interview, I fiddled with the tape recorder, checked the batteries, and tested the sound quality.When I looked up at Natie she was sucking her thumb and tugging on her short denim miniskirt that I assumed was riding up the back of her thighs, causing her to stick uncomfortably to the seat of the metal chair. Natie was a thirteen-year-old girl whom I had met in one of the focus groups. She wore her hair pulled back in pigtails, with pretty pink bows covering the elastics. She told me she took time to pick out just the right outfit for our outing.With her denim skirt she wore a white cotton blouse with capped sleeves, embroidered with pink and blue flowers at the neckline.As our interview progressed, she described her first consensual sexual experience while intermittently sucking her thumb. Two days before Christmas, Natie had left her schoolmates in Charlestown, where they were participating in the holiday festivities, to go for a ride with Dylan, an eighteen-year-old boy she knew from her parish.They went to Pinney’s Beach, and there, in the backseat of his Nissan, she had sexual intercourse for the first time. She described it as painful and quick; she reported that they had used a condom. Dylan had at least one other girlfriend of whom Natie was aware; since having sex, she had seen him, but they had not had sex again, nor had he displayed much affection toward her. Her sexual encounter had been six months ago. As Natie explained, fear is an integral part of her understanding of sexuality :“AIDS scares me more than pregnancy.You get pregnant, you get a child, and you live and de child live.You get AIDS and you die.”While Natie measured her fear of AIDS against her fear of becoming pregnant, both fears seem to play an essential part in shaping her sexuality: “De fact dat me mother got me when she thirteen young [thirteen years old], she couldn’t go out. She didn’t have much privilege. I want privilege. I want to see me sixteen party and all dat. Everybody thinkin’ dat I was goin’ to get pregnant at thirteen and I went to thirteen and didn’t get pregnant.” 89 Natie’s desire to enjoy her adolescence, to celebrate her sixteenth birthday , to take pleasure in her favorite pastimes, which include going to the horse races with her girlfriends as well as playing netball, appear to be strong determinants in shaping her sexual practices. Like Natie, many girls discussed the threat of an unwanted pregnancy and its consequences, a threat that appeared to be a deterrent to engaging in sex.Also like Natie,the girls talked about their fear of contracting HIV. Given these girls’ fears, it seems critical to examine public health programs among the disparate but overlapping discourses affecting the production of girls’ sexualities. It is remarkable that a thirteen-year-old Nevisian girl has come to narrate her sexual subjectivity in light of her concern over an unwanted pregnancy and HIV.This brief vignette about Natie reveals the complexity of the linkages between public health programs, including those aimed at reducing the rate of teen pregnancy and HIV prevention on the one hand, and the production of sexuality on the other hand. In this chapter, public health programs that focus on teen pregnancy, HIV prevention, and sexual violence will be examined to suggest that public health is not only a site for the struggle to construct a particular type of sexuality, but that it is also a site of social ambivalence and discomfort around sexuality. As a result of globalization, the social regulation of sexuality on Nevis has become more diffused.Weeks (1986), writing about modernity and sexuality in general, argues that there has been a “move away from moral regulation by churches to a more secular mode of organization through medicine, education , psychology, social work, and welfare practices” (29). Nevis, over the past ten years, has followed a similar trajectory in terms of the social regulation of sexuality. Nevisian sexualities no longer fall exclusively under the domain of the church. Public health programs have become increasingly more organized and well-established...

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