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>> 57 3 The Sexual (Mis)Education of Latina Girls For our first scheduled interview, I met Samantha, who had characterized her mother as “old-school Puerto Rican,” at Centro Adelante, where she was organizing poster-size diagrams for a presentation she was preparing on safe sex.1 The professionally printed diagrams illustrated female and male reproductive organs and different birth control and safe-sex methods. Samantha, along with Carolyn, a young African American woman, had been training to be a peer health educator at the Chicago Committee on Youth Health (CCYH). Under the supervision of a CCYH youth coordinator, the two young women of color led an engaging one-hour workshop on safe sex for a group of fifteen to twenty young women and men that afternoon. Their audience, composed mostly of Latina/o youth, listened attentively and asked pointed questions about access to sexual health resources in the community and about safe-sex methods. A young man asked where one could obtain an HIV test and whether parental consent was required for such a test, while a young woman inquired about parental consent for access to birth control. With minimal assistance from the youth coordinator, Samantha and Carolyn 58 > 59 of their sexual subjectivity and respectability. The intersection of Latina girls’ multiple identities—as U.S. Latinas, as daughters of immigrants and/or migrants, as students, and as sexual subjects—shapes their understandings of the role of education in their lives and the importance they assign to their future success. Sex Education and Public Schools Presently, sex education curricula are grouped into two broad categories: abstinence-plus (also called comprehensive sexuality education) and abstinence -only-until-marriage (also called abstinence-only). Comprehensive sex education does cover abstinence but also teaches about contraception, sexually transmitted diseases, HIV, and abortion. Slightly more than half of the girls I spoke with described access to this type of sex education. The rest of the young women were provided abstinence-only education. Abstinenceonly education does not teach about contraception or abortion. When sexually transmitted diseases and HIV are referenced, it is typically to highlight the negative consequences of premarital sex. With the exception of two girls, all of the young women who participated in this study were or had been at one point Chicago Public Schools (CPS) students.8 Since the average age of young women at the time of interview was sixteen, their middle school sex education generally occurred between 1998 and 2002, a period marked by increased federal funding for abstinence-only programs. Although the Reagan administration had made federal funding available for abstinence-only sex education beginning in the early 1980s, the support and promotion of abstinence-only programs intensified in the mid1990s . More than $1 billion were channeled to abstinence-only sex education programs between 1996 and 2006, while federal funds were not made available for comprehensive sexuality education.9 Although girls discussed their sexuality education experiences at all grade levels, it was their experiences in the sixth through the eighth grades that they elaborated upon in great detail.10 During the years, while these young women were middle school students, the Board of Education of the Chicago Public Schools did not take an official stance or provide guidelines on sex education. Thus, it was possible to have variations in the quality and content of sex education in CPS. However, there were similarities in the girls’ descriptions of their sex education in terms of how they participated in it and who was designated to teach it. For example, the majority of the girls said that female and male students generally received sex education together in the classroom, whether it was comprehensive or abstinence-only sex education. 60 > 61 was starting to answer me when Ms. Phyllis [her eighth-grade teacher] was like, ‘Now why do you want to know about that, Minerva? You don’t got anything to worry about if you’re behaving and, anyway, we are out of time.’” Other girls told of similar exchanges with teachers and sex educators in which their inquiries were met with suspicion, suggesting that they were perceived as “knowing girls” and therefore assumed to be sexually active because they displayed some knowledge and/or curiosity about sexuality.13 By publicly questioning Minerva about the motives behind her inquiry, her teacher communicated to the students not only that certain questions were invalid but that they could shift girls unto the wrong side of the good-girl/bad-girl dichotomy. The young women vividly...

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