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.

Full Product Details

9780814733165

Table of Contents

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 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

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

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

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.

Tab Content 6

Customer Reviews

Recent Reviews

Countries Available