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This article suggests ways to teach teenagers about their right to complex personhood in relationships in a way that honours the psychological complexities of intimacy, as well as teenagers' wisdom as people already 'in' relationships. Recognition of students' complex personhood entails attention to two dimensions: (1) the emotional ambiguities, pleasures and risks inherent in all intimate relationships; and (2) the socio-structural context of students' lives. We draw from interviews with young adults about their teenage relationships, in which they challenge conventional understandings of 'healthy' versus 'unhealthy' relationship categories. These data reveal that teenagers may benefit from pedagogical conversations centred on the navigation of emotional risks versus the avoidance of risks. Interviews also illustrate how the larger social context and structural forces affecting teenagers' lives shaped the types of intimate harms they navigated, although they did not always have a language through which to understand this structural dimension. Throughout the article, we advance a complex personhood framework, calling on sex educators to centre the emotional ambiguities, depth, wisdom and social embeddedness of teenage relationships.

How did the COVID-19 pandemic affect domestic violence? We might expect that the most marginalized victims experienced the most dramatic upticks in violence during the pandemic. However, through life-story interviews, I found that survivors who were enduring abuse, poverty, housing insecurity, and systems involvement pre-COVID did not suffer worse abuse during the pandemic. For multiply marginalized survivors, COVID did not produce more violence directly, but instead worsened the social contexts in which they already experienced violence and related problems, setting them up for future instability. The small group of survivors in this study who did experience COVID as a novel period of violence were likely to be middle-class and better-resourced. To explain these findings, I suggest moving away from a model of crisis as "external stressor." I offer the concept "clustered vulnerabilities" to explain how—rather than entering in as "shock"—crisis amplifies existing structural problems: social vulnerabilities pile up, becoming denser and more difficult to manage. "Clustered vulnerabilities" better explains crisis in the lives of marginalized people and is useful for analyzing the relationship between chronic disadvantage and crisis across cases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article suggests ways to teach teenagers about their right to complex personhood in relationships in a way that honours the psychological complexities of intimacy, as well as teenagers' wisdom as people already 'in' relationships. Recognition of students' complex personhood entails attention to two dimensions: 1) the emotional ambiguities, pleasures and risks inherent in all intimate relationships; 2) the socio-structural context of students' lives. We draw from interviews with young adults about their teenage relationships, in which they challenge conventional understandings of 'healthy' versus 'unhealthy' relationship categories. These data reveal that teenagers may benefit from pedagogical conversations centred on the navigation of emotional risks versus the avoidance of risks. Interviews also illustrate how the larger social context and structural forces affecting teenagers' lives shaped the types of intimate harms they navigated, although they did not always have a language through which to understand this structural dimension. Throughout the article, we advance a complex personhood framework, calling on sex educators to centre the emotional ambiguities, depth, wisdom and social embeddedness of teenage relationships. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through life story interviews with victims of psychological abuse, we offer new empirical evidence for a tactic of coercive control: mental health weaponization. Shaped by structural vulnerabilities, mental health weaponization involves three key features: gendered accusations that victims are “crazy” and emotionally unstable; leveraging victims' past traumas against them, particularly that they form “bad” attachments to men; mobilizing victims’ mental health diagnoses or symptoms against them to cast them as noncredible. This article enhances our understanding of controlling and abusive tactics in intimate relationships by showing how they are rooted in social inequalities at the intersection of gender and mental health status. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Intermediary spaces between health social movements and biomedicine have proliferated since the 1970s and have typically been analyzed through the lenses of co‐optation or hybridization. In this article, we present data from two separate empirical projects (teaching and learning the pelvic exam in medical schools and feminist anti‐violence counseling programs) in order to theorize what we call "counter‐clinical spaces." Counter‐clinical spaces are medicalized sites of knowledge production and practice that are produced through social movements' contestations with biomedicine. Other examples include sexual assault nurse examiner programs, LGBT health centers, and sexual health clinics. Counter‐clinical spaces are "counter" and "clinical" in several ways. First, these spaces are distinctly clinical in that they intervene in the health of the body. Second, these spaces are counter‐clinical in that they are organized in critique of dominant medical practices. Crucially, counter‐clinical spaces engage the clinical encounter as a site of transformation: social movement actors target clinicians' deployment of medical power, especially in their interactions with marginalized persons. We thus attend to the scale upon which social movements make a change in and against medicine, and we highlight how social movement logics can and do change practices even when they are unable to shift structures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Intermediary spaces between health social movements and biomedicine have proliferated since the 1970s and have typically been analyzed through the lenses of co‐optation or hybridization. In this article, we present data from two separate empirical projects (teaching and learning the pelvic exam in medical schools and feminist anti‐violence counseling programs) in order to theorize what we call "counter‐clinical spaces." Counter‐clinical spaces are medicalized sites of knowledge production and practice that are produced through social movements' contestations with biomedicine. Other examples include sexual assault nurse examiner programs, LGBT health centers, and sexual health clinics. Counter‐clinical spaces are "counter" and "clinical" in several ways. First, these spaces are distinctly clinical in that they intervene in the health of the body. Second, these spaces are counter‐clinical in that they are organized in critique of dominant medical practices. Crucially, counter‐clinical spaces engage the clinical encounter as a site of transformation: social movement actors target clinicians' deployment of medical power, especially in their interactions with marginalized persons. We thus attend to the scale upon which social movements make a change in and against medicine, and we highlight how social movement logics can and do change practices even when they are unable to shift structures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]