Prompt: In this week’s readings, how are boundaries of ethnicity, race and sexuality illustrated and enforced? In what ways do the readings expand our understanding of how institutions shape experience? What surprised you? What insights did you gain from these articles and the video?As you read, take note of key concepts and write them down. What did you see, read, hear in the week’s module? (quotes, examples EVIDENCE) What was your INTERPRETATION? Associations, observations, questions.https://historydaily.org/tignon-laws-facts-trivia-…https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/146807…
IMPREGNATING IMAGES
Visions of race, sex, and citizenship
in Californias teen pregnancy prevention campaigns Ruby C. Tapia
Introduction
Many cultural and critical race theorists have established that the epidemic of teen pregnancy in the US is a socially constructed phenomenon, one that arose with the national economic and cultural anxieties of the 1970s. Up until the Adolescent and Family Life Act was introduced in 1978, the status of teenagers as a special population that merited special legislative attention and government resources did not officially exist (Kristin Luker 1996, pp. 71 76). At this point legislative officials finally responded to the long-standing demands of womens rights advocates to extend the right of women to control their fertility
to teenage women.1 These advocates leveraged their case by putting forth the argument
that teenage pregnancyassumed to be un-wanted and out-of-wedlock pregnancyled
to poverty. Previously, womens rights advocates had argued the inverse: that poverty led
to unwanted pregnancy, in order to make the case for federal funding of contraceptive
education and services.2 Thus, in an effort to combat poverty and, more specifically,
to reduce the number of women receiving AFDC (Aid to Families with Dependent Children),
legislative officials passed the Adolescent Health, Services, and Pregnancy Prevention and
Care Act, which allocated funding to birth control education and provision (Luker 1996,
pp. 72 73).
The epidemic of teen pregnancy provided a convenient, albeit inaccurate,
explanation and possible solution for the social, cultural and economic transformations that
were occurring in the US in the early 1970s. These changes and the fears they induced for
mainstream Americans were in great part a result of the countercultural struggles and civil
rights victories of the 1960s. They were also a product of national and global economic
restructuring that, with the help of the 1965 Immigration Act, drastically transformed the
racial demography of the country. This changed landscape, and the longstanding anxiety
with regard to maintaining American racial purity that it exacerbated, set the stage for the
institutional and popular discursive connections between race, citizenship, and
consumption that would determine how the teen pregnancy problem would be imaged
through the twentieth century.
