Gender and Sexual Agency considers how heterosexual Latino American, Asian American and white youth negotiate sexual encounters. In particular, the book examines sexual agency: exploring the question of why some young people assertively pursue what they want in a sexual encounter, while others go along with sexual activity they do not want. By comparing both young men and young women, Albanesi offers a unique perspective on how an individual's emotional experience of gender informs his or her willingness to exercise sexual agency. Using interviews to support her theoretical argument, Albanesi describes 11 different types of sexual agency, ranging from having strong convictions about their sexual decisions to abdicating responsibility to their partner. As the expressers of sexual agency, the voices of these youth from primarily working-class backgrounds come through to take us into their sexual decisions as they understand and experience them within the context of their lives. Ultimately, regardless of the decision, the book shows that youth are well aware of the decisions that they are making, even if they can't always express those reasons clearly.

During the spring of 2008, one of the media s feeding frenzies involved a United Church of Christ congregation in Chicago, pastored by the Reverend Dr. Jeremiah Wright. For days and weeks, all one could see on every news channel were a few very short clips, absent of context, of Reverend Wright s sermons preached some time ago. What followed outraged many on both sides of the political fence. The sound bites lent themselves to commentators easy, negative analysis of the sermons. In the traditional media, commentators offered an interpretation, couched in the language of patriotism, that Wright was too angry, that he overstated the problem of racism in America today. While some were extremely frustrated at this nearly universal take on Wright s sermons and felt it served to mask the continuing reality of racial oppression, others saw a positive side, in that racism had resurfaced as a topic of conversation in homes across America. Nearly forty years after the Civil Rights Movement had fixed everything, people started talking, discussing, and even arguing about racism in the United States. Was racism still with us? If so, how could that be after such a long period of time? Or had racism just changed from blatant, in-your-face discrimination to a new, post-affirmative action, color-blind racism. from the introduction to Moving Beyond Racism Meet the twenty-one authors of Moving Beyond Racism who were moved to share their compelling personal memories and the events that inspired their reassessment of the complexities of race relations in 21st century America. You ll nod in recognition, shake your head in disbelief, and bear witness to the courage and self-knowledge that comes from bravely facing the place that racial attitudes play in our everyday lives. Make no mistake, the people you are about to meet are your neighbors, your co-workers, and your friends. Moving Beyond Racism is about all of us.