Distributing Condoms and Hope is a feminist ethnographic account of how youth sexual health programs in the racially and economically stratified city of “Millerston” reproduce harm in the marginalized communities they are meant to serve. Chris A. Barcelos makes space for the stories of young mothers, who often recognize the narrow ways that public health professionals respond to pregnancies. Barcelos's findings show that teachers, social workers, and nurses ignore systemic issues of race, class, and gender and instead advocate for individual-level solutions such as distributing condoms and promoting "hope." Through a lens of reproductive justice, Distributing Condoms and Hope imagines a different approach to serving marginalized youth—a support system that neither uses their lives as a basis for disciplinary public policies nor romanticizes their struggles.

This project uses discursive, visual, and ethnographic approaches situated in a critical feminist methodology to understand how ways of knowing about youth sexuality and reproduction influence community health work. I understand the "problem" in this inquiry as the discursive contexts that limit critical ways of knowing about young people's sexual subjectivities and practices and about the design of policies and programs. Although race, class, gender, and sexuality are understood in the public health literature as important social determinants of health, there is a lack of research that applies a critical, feminist lens to these constructs. I draw on three years of ethnographic research in a small, northeastern city with a large Puerto Rican population and high rates of teen pregnancy to illustrate how community health workers take up and transform discourses of race, science, and sexuality as well as how teen parents situate their embodied experiences within these discourses. I combine interviews with key informants, participant observation at coalition meetings and community events, and visual analysis of stories produced by pregnant and parenting young women to argue that the production of authoritative racialized, sexual scientific knowledge both obscures and contributes to health and social inequalities. The politics of youth sexuality and reproduction easily reify what everyone "knows to be true" and enable community health workers to naturalize claims about race, culture, sexual health, and causality. I argue that a reproductive justice framework can shift the discursive context of youth sexuality and reproduction in the city to promote racial, economic, and sexual justice.

This book contains six papers on condom availability programs in the public schools. "Executive Summary" (Stryker, Samuels, and Smith) looks at the consequences of unprotected sex, adolescent condom use, condom promotion and availability, the role of schools, sex education in schools, how school condom programs work, distribution mechanisms, staffing and counseling, parental involvement, funding sources, legal issues, and program evaluation. "A Survey of Condom Programs" (Leitman, Kramer, and Taylor) discusses the findings from a study of superintendents in 299 high-school and middle-school districts on condom availability programs. "The View from Schools: Four Focus Groups" (Greene) discusses the perspectives of four focus groups of urban and nonurban school superintendents and school board members. "Funding and Policy Options" (Brindis) looks at rules affecting public funding and describes several model programs and their funding streams. "Legal Issues" (Solomon) discusses the legal issues regarding condom availability programs in public schools. "Research and Evaluation" (Kirby) looks at findings from previous research and emphasizes the need for both research and evaluation into the effectiveness of condom availability programs in the schools. (NB)

A teen who's never even been kissed becomes her school's unofficial sex expert in Olivia Hinebaugh's fun, voice-y contemporary YA romance debut. Seventeen-year-old Lacey Burke feels like the last person on the planet who should be doling out sex advice. For starters, she’s never even kissed anyone, and she hates breaking the rules. Up until now, she's been a straight-A music geek that no one even notices. All she cares about is jamming out with her best friends, Theo and Evita. But then everything changes. When Lacey sees first-hand how much damage the abstinence-only sex-ed curriculum of her school can do, she decides to take a stand and starts doling out wisdom and contraception to anyone who seeks her out in the girls' restroom. Meanwhile, things with Theo have become complicated, and soon Lacey is not just keeping everyone else’s secrets, but her own as well.