ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the tense and often conflictual location of Arab American femininities at the intersections of two contradictory discourses: Arab cultural reauthenticity and hegemonic US nationalism. It also focuses on two themes that provide particularly clear illustrations of these intersections, namely: the connected issues of sexual needs and controllability and sexual refusal. The chapter describes how respondents enacted their class and gender through sexual needs, controllability, and refusal, and outlines some of the ways in which these sexual processes may affect sexual risk taking, unintended pregnancy, and sexually transmitted infection (STI) and human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) transmission. It explores sexual needs and controllability and sexual refusal to illustrate some of the ways in which women and men "do" class and gender in the bedroom. The chapter discusses how the classed and gendered enactments, or doing, of sexuality may have shaped the sexual situations in which women and men use—or do not use—contraception.
