Subtitle: Girls' Sexuality in a Caribbean Consumer Culture
Author: Debra Curtis
Subject: Anthropology , Latin American Studies
Paper ISBN 978-0-8135-4430-4
Cloth ISBN 978-0-8135-4429-8
Pages: 256 pages
Series: Series in Childhood Studies
Publication Date: February 2009

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"Sleek, readable, and provocative, this book is one of the best-written monographs I have read in recent years. A perfect text to use in courses on the anthropology of gender and sexuality."
-Don Kulick, author of Travesti: Sex, Gender and Culture among Brazilian Transgendered Prostitutes

"Curtis explodes the limits of agency and coercion in this ethnography of schoolgirl sexuality and confronts the misrecognized reality of violent gender power relations."
-Philippe Bourgois, Richard Perry University Professor of Anthropology & Family and Community Medicine, University of Pennsylvania

Pleasures and Perils follows a group of young girls living on Nevis, an island society in the Eastern Caribbean. In this provocative ethnography, Debra Curtis examines their sexuality in gripping detail: why do Nevisian girls engage in sexual activity at such young ages? Where is the line between coercion and consent? How does a desire for wealth affect a girl's sexual practices?

Curtis shows that girls are often caught between conflicting discourses of Christian teachings about chastity, public health cautions about safe sex, and media enticements about consumer delights. Sexuality's contradictions are exposed: power and powerless­ness, self-determination and cultural control, violence and pleasure. Pleasures and Perils illuminates the methodological and ethical issues anthropologists face when they conduct research on sex, especially among girls. The sexually explicit narratives conveyed in this book challenge not only the reader's own thoughts on sexuality but also the broader limits and possibilities of ethnography.
 

Debra Curtis is an assistant professor in the department of sociology and anthropology at Salve Regina University in Rhode Island.