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“Teen Sex, an Equal-Opportunity Menace: Multicultural Politics in 16 and Pregnant"
... According to the representations and discourses within the show, a young girl becoming pregnant is less likely to be a blessing and more likely to be a curse. While these accusations are quite alarming if true, it is admittedly difficult to deduce the direct effects of the hegemonic discourses present within the show on teenage viewers (Daniel, 2013). ...
Discourses constructing teen pregnancy as a dire result of misguided welfare policy helped to usher in the punitive welfare reform legislation of 1996. An important counterpart to that law has been an increase in private sector teen pregnancy prevention work, led by the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy. In response to calls for innovative, market-based approaches to social welfare, the National Campaign has spearheaded a trend of utilizing new media technologies, such as social networking websites, mobile and smartphone capabilities, and online gaming in teen pregnancy prevention. This article examines the social-media-based work of the National Campaign, showing the heavily disciplinary and moralizing functions of these strategies and their role within a new construction of social welfare. It argues that these tactics form a redefined notion of the social safety net based on a vision of citizens distributing vital, attractively packaged information among themselves via a privatized cybernetwork in order to maintain social well-being through the cultivation of proper sexual and reproductive behavior. Within this framework, teen sexuality emerges as the most urgent target for discipline and management. Viewed as impulsive, naive, media savvy, and trend obsessed, teenagers appear to require provocative market-based interventions into their most intimate moments. Grounded in the neoliberal discourses of multiculturalism, market rationality, and intimate citizenship, this teen pregnancy prevention work ultimately serves to obscure and undergird the punitive work of welfare reform and its deepening of inequalities based on race, class, gender, and sexuality.
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