
Respect Yourself, Protect Yourself
Latina Girls and Sexual Identity
240 pages
1 table
October, 2012
ISBN: 9780814733172
Reviews
“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
“The best book I have read on the formation of sexual subjectivities young urban Latinas assert in an urban, working-class community. Lorena Garcia’s 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
“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. Garcia’s 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
"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
"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
“[…] [I]t would make excellent reading in courses on a variety of topics, including gender, sexuality, race and ethnicity, social problems, and public health.”
—Social Forces
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