Latina Girls, Sexual Agency, and the Contradictions of Neoliberalism

This article contributes to the literature on adolescent girls’ sexual subjectivities using individual interviews conducted with 30 working-class, Latina teenagers. Latina girls’ accounts of their experiences with sexual debut, current sexual relationships, and sexual abstinence reveal that they construct sexual subjectivities through multiple forms of sexual agency; however, for some, the absence of sexual agency remains an enduring feature of their sexual experiences. The findings illustrate the contradictions embedded in Latina girls’ narratives of sexual agency whereby they often draw on dominant discourses of neoliberalism, heterosexuality, and traditional gender ideology as rhetorical strategies by which to legitimize their sexual decision-making and resist their subjectification as “at-risk” girls. The uptake of these discourses in the narratives of those marginalized at the intersections of gender, race, and class demonstrate the salience of neoliberalism as a form of disciplinary power and have implications for ongoing efforts to foster positive adolescent sexual development.