Synopses & Reviews
While Latina girls have high teen birth rates and are at increasing risk for contracting sexually transmitted infections, their sexual lives are much more complex than the negative stereotypes of them as “helpless” or “risky” (or worse) suggest. In Respect Yourself, Protect Yourself, Lorena Garcia examines how Latina girls negotiate their emerging sexual identities and attempt to create positive sexual experiences for themselves. Through a focus on their sexual agency, Garcia demonstrates that Latina girls experiences with sexism, racism, homophobia and socioeconomic marginality inform how they engage and begin to rework their meanings and processes of gender and sexuality, emphasizing how Latina youth themselves understand their sexuality, particularly how they conceptualize and approach sexual safety and pleasure. At a time of controversy over the appropriate role of sex education in schools, Respect Yourself, Protect Yourself, provides a rare look and an important understanding of the sexual lives of a traditionally marginalized group.
Review
“A groundbreaking study that interrupts the prevailing discourse on young Latinas as doomed victims always at risk of pregnancy. In this refreshing and forceful book, Lorena Garcia asks illuminating new questions that highlight how some Latina girls negotiate sexual safety and pleasure.” -Lourdes Torres,author of Puerto Rican Discourse
Review
“The best book I have read on the formation of sexual subjectivities young urban Latinas assert in an urban, working-class community. Lorena Garcias fine analysis of adolescent sexuality and sexual practices redirects research and policy on Latinas away from a cultural deficit perspective towards one that incorporates difference and agency.” -Denise A. Segura,co-editor of Women and Migration in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands: A Reader
Review
“A groundbreaking study. . . .Garcia asks illuminating new questions that highlight how some Latina girls negotiate sexual safety and pleasure within the context of their racialized, classed, and gendered locations.” -Lourdes Torres,author of author of Puerto Rican Discourse: A Sociolinguistic Study of A New York Suburb
Review
“Finally, a scholarly book that dismantles the dominant narratives that pathologize young second-generation US Latinas as hyper-sexual and destined to be pregnant. Garcia convincingly documents how working-class young Latinas in Chicago maneuver attaining sexual respectability, engaging in safe sex, and being sexually active simultaneously. Garcias subjects -and their negotiations about their sexual respectability—belie national and dominant hysterias about working-class Latina sexuality and evince the complexities, contradictions, and courage behind sexual subjectivity and agency.” -Frances R. Aparicio,co-editor of Musical Migrations: Transnationalism and Cultural Hybridity in Latin/o America
Review
"Garcia's intersectional analysis is brilliant as she always considers how pattern in mothers' and daughters' responses and actions reflect larger cultural discourses about women, motherhood, sexuality, race, or class. She is careful not to homogenize Latinas. She also carefully deliberates the complex, and sometimes contradictory, ways in which certain responses resist stereotypes or specifically gendered/ raced performances while bolstering instantiations of patriarchy or heteronormativity." -Jenna Vinson,Community Literary Journal
Review
"Respect Yourself, Protect Yourself is an undeniably strong book that pushes research on youth sexuality and has much to offer gender, sexuality, and race scholars."-Laura Hamilton,American Journal of Sociology
Synopsis
2013 Winner of the ASA Race, Gender and Class Section's Distinguished Book Award While Latina girls have high teen birth rates and are at increasing risk for contracting sexually transmitted infections, their sexual lives are much more complex than the negative stereotypes of them as helpless or risky (or worse) suggest. In Respect Yourself, Protect Yourself, Lorena Garcia examines how Latina girls negotiate their emerging sexual identities and attempt to create positive sexual experiences for themselves. Through a focus on their sexual agency, Garcia demonstrates that Latina girls experiences with sexism, racism, homophobia and socioeconomic marginality inform how they engage and begin to rework their meanings and processes of gender and sexuality, emphasizing how Latina youth themselves understand their sexuality, particularly how they conceptualize and approach sexual safety and pleasure. At a time of controversy over the appropriate role of sex education in schools, Respect Yourself, Protect Yourself, provides a rare look and an important understanding of the sexual lives of a traditionally marginalized group. "
Synopsis
Exploring young Latina youth's sexual agency, education, and expression
While Latina girls have high teen birth rates and are at increasing risk for contracting sexually transmitted infections, their sexual lives are much more complex than the negative stereotypes of them as "helpless" or "risky" (or worse) suggest. In Respect Yourself, Protect Yourself, Lorena Garcia examines how Latina girls negotiate their emerging sexual identities and attempt to create positive sexual experiences for themselves. Through a focus on their sexual agency, Garcia demonstrates that Latina girls' experiences with sexism, racism, homophobia and socioeconomic marginality inform how they engage and begin to rework their meanings and processes of gender and sexuality, emphasizing how Latina youth themselves understand their sexuality, particularly how they conceptualize and approach sexual safety and pleasure. At a time of controversy over the appropriate role of sex education in schools, Respect Yourself, Protect Yourself, provides a rare look and an important understanding of the sexual lives of a traditionally marginalized group.
About the Author
Lorena Garcia is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
Table of Contents
Introduction: Studying the "Other" Girls 2. She's Old School Like That: Mother and Daughter Sex Talks 3. The Sexual (Mis)Education of Latina Girls 4. Handlin' Your Business: Sexual Respectability and Peers 5. Playing Lil' Games: Partners and Safe-Sex Strategies 6. Conclusion