Abstract
Gloria González-López again illustrates her extraordinarily strong skills as an ethnographic researcher with this powerful book. Based on life history interviews with 60 individuals who have experienced kinship sex and 35 clinical professionals, González-López takes on the difficult topic of incest. In the pages of Family Secrets, the reader will find a wealth of thick description on each study participant coupled with a meticulous analysis of how, collectively, the incest stories the respondents describe are related to larger historical patterns of patriarchy and the subjugation of women, girls and effeminate boys. Family Secrets is a painful read to be sure but also an essential one.
González-López unpacks the function that incest plays in her respondents’ families of origin. She finds that in some homes respondents became conjugal daughters – tending to their fathers’ unmet sexual needs and, in doing so, supporting the marital harmony between their parents. Undoubtedly these practices impacted respondents’ relationships with their mothers. Some describe a relationship of jealousy and competition, while others describe their mothers as weak and disempowered. González-López offers that daughters from families that normalize the sexual harassment of girls are vulnerable targets for sexual violence, not only because of this normalization but also because daughters in these incestuous families are being raised by women who have also experienced incest, creating a complex web of incest within families across multiple generations. González-López terms these intergenerational experiences with sexual violence family genealogies of incest.
One of the book’s many strengths is that González-López does not limit her analysis of incest to a model of fathers or uncles engaging in sexual acts with their minor daughters and nieces. This narrative depicts only one form of incest in Family Secrets. Other forms highlighted in this book include sexual practices among cousins or siblings, whereby respondents describe serving as sex surrogates for their older brothers and male cousins which affords these boys the space to engage in sexual exploration and reaffirm their heterosexuality in an environment with minimal risks for them. Another strength can be found in González-López’s analysis of effeminate boys as the target of incest within the family. Some experienced sexual violence motivated by homophobia as family members used this tactic as a way of disciplining the effeminate boy into submission. For others, however, these sexual encounters are described as voluntary or romantic encounters with cousins in their peer group. It is here that González López best illustrates the continuum between consent and coercion. She highlights the extent of sexual practices that cannot be described as violent or dangerous and those that involve desire even when they involve minor children. Ultimately, however, González-López makes the convincing argument that effeminate boys (or those presumed to be gay) in the family are hypersexualized and become the targets of other male family members’ sexual curiosities, desires to assert their masculinity or to test their heterosexuality.
González-López takes on a formidable challenge in Family Secrets. The relative absence of research on Mexican families within Sociology means that the few existing works in this area can easily become the token examples that represent an entire ethnic group. Given this, research on incest in Mexican families is a risk for a scholar who senses an obligation to ensure the work is not taken out of context or used in culturally reductive ways. González-López demonstrates a heightened awareness of this risk as she strategically weaves in research on familial incest in the United States and elsewhere, demonstrating for the reader how these sexual practices are negotiated in many different families irrespective of race/ethnicity, national origin, class and religion and that incest is a social problem that transcends these factors. She further insulates this book from cultural reduction, by reminding the reader that the normalization of male aggression within the family is about patriarchy that results in the respondents serving as sexual objects within their family units. Incest she traces begins as sexual harassment within the family and escalates overtime to sexual penetration.
Overall, Family Secrets is a remarkable contribution to the areas of Sexualities, Family Studies Gender, and Latin American Studies. This book should become required reading for all scholars interested in these areas.