Exploring Conceptions and Discourses of Gender, Sexuality and Pregnancy Amongst Mexican Adolescents

This book shows the importance of understanding how gender influences views on teen pregnancy amongst working and lower middle class Mexican adolescents.

It demonstrates how teenagers negotiate dominant gendered discourses related to sexuality, contraception and parenthood, considering if and when discourses of gender, sexuality, femininity and masculinity may be shifting and how.

Overall, most teenage boys in this study still refer to their active sexual practices and their role as provider in the family to define their reproductive identities, while young women seem to comply with dominant moral expectations of sexually passive femininity, defined mainly through motherhood. However, the findings also highlight how resistance to dominant gender discourses can take place, particularly with recognition of teenage girls as sexual beings with needs and desires.

Although the findings generated by this study are from 1994–1997, they remain relevant, given that in 2017, one in five pregnancies in Mexico was from a teenage mother.

Miriam Weil-Behar is a child and adolescent psychologist from Mexico with a BA in clinical psychology from the Anahuac University, two Master of Education degrees in special education: emotional disturbances and learning disabilities from The American University, a Certificate of Advanced Studies (CAS) in children and adolescents at risk from Harvard University and an MPhil in education from University College London.

She has worked at the Mexican Children Hospital, Federico Gómez, in Mexico City, at The Psychiatric Institute of Washington, in Washington D.C., at the Child and Family Foundation with children from incarcerated mothers, at the General Hospital, Dr. Manuel Gea González, and in her private practice for over 30 years, all in Mexico City.