Overview

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.

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9780814733172

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Reviews

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

The best book I have read on the formation of sexual subjectivities young urban Latinas assert in an urban, working-class community. Her 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

Author Information

Lorena Garcia is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She is the author of Respect Yourself, Protect Yourself: Latina Girls and Sexual Identity.

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