Abstract
Between September 2002 and November 2004, Lorena Garcia, a sociologist at the University of Illinois–Chicago, hung out with and interviewed 20 Mexican-origin girls and 20 Puerto Rican girls. Garcia sought these girls’ stories of their emerging sexuality and their approaches to safe sex. Respect Yourself, Protect Yourself is the resulting book, and it is outstanding. Those writing or teaching about sex education, sexual subjectivity, gender, Latina studies, transition to adulthood, immigration, or heteronormativity will find it valuable.
Latina girls, as Garcia and her informants remind us, typically are studied and reported on from the viewpoint of sexual pathologies, including high STD and teen pregnancy rates. These “social problems”–type projects do not attempt to construct an understanding of Latina sexualities. Instead of sexuality as social problem, Garcia focuses on Latinas’ sexual agency. Working intersectionally, Garcia collected and analyzed stories of Latina teens’ “meanings and decision making around safe-sex, paying attention to how this was related to their negotiation of their emerging sexuality” (p. 149). Garcia’s seamless integration of lesbian and straight girls’ experiences (32 girls identified as heterosexual and 8 as lesbian) foregrounds her inclusivity without neglecting difference within the intersecting categories of race, ethnicity, gender, generation, and sexual orientation.
Garcia’s fine writing matches her strong thinking and original perspective on reversing the typical pathologizing approach to Latina (and many other young people’s) sexuality. She brings readers into close contact with her informants. At every chapter and new topic, Garcia gives visual context that is warm and inviting. When she introduces new people—or brings them back—conversational strategies facilitate readers’ tracking. This writing blends two kinds of sensitivity, respect for subjects and readers, and is consistent with her compassionate approach to the subject matter.
In chapter one, “Studying the ‘Other’ Girls,” Garcia illustrates the state of theory and research relevant to the social construction of gender and sexuality among Latinas. Without getting bogged down in jargon, Garcia faithfully and efficiently explains the empirical background on Latina youth sexuality, profiling concepts such as the politics of respectability and gender and sexuality as social constructs. She does this throughout the book. In chapter five, for example, she provides a sketch of hegemonic masculinity that is perfectly in context, and yet could stand alone as an explanation for this key sociological concept.
Chapter two, “She’s Old School Like That,” focuses on mother–daughter relationships, using Garcia’s interviews with 18 of the girls’ mothers. Family contexts demonstrate the contrasts sustained throughout the book between the Mexican and Puerto Rican mothers’ views of their daughters’ sexuality. The Mexican moms are more “old-school,” but both communities emphasize opposition to what is seen as white girls’ more casual approach to sex. Garcia provides a rich portrayal of intergenerational conflicts, some (but not all) of which are particular to immigrant families.
Chapter three, “The Sexual (Mis)Education of Latina Girls,” captures the social class, racial and ethnic, and gendered contradictions of sex education, extending the case made in Jessica Fields’ Risky Lessons: Sex Education and Social Inequality (2008). Garcia, like Fields, demonstrates how institutions reinforce racial, ethnic, and gender stereotypes through sex education. Garcia’s subjects convey their own critiques of social problem–style sex education and stereotyping at school. The lesbian women, in particular, offer stories of the heteronormative limitations of much existing sex education.
Chapter four, “‘Handlin’ Your Business’: Sexual Respectability and Peers,” portrays the discourse of personal responsibility these girls engage in, as well as the girls’ active work to maintain “respectability”—their own and, through policing behaviors, others’. Garcia also listened for girls’ attitudes towards pleasure. This yielded illustrations of finessed expressions of desire and issues around orgasm achievement. The subtlety was part of their “respectability” work. The struggle towards sexual subjectivity is made visible in cultural context, and will be valuable to my students, I suspect.
The final topic, Chapter five’s “Playing Lil’ Games: Partners and Safe Sex Strategies,” zeroes in on young couples’ power dynamics. In this case, as in the topics in other chapters, Garcia shows how much the young women she worked with negotiate their emerging sexual identities and sexual selves with articulate awareness of family, cultural, and gender politics. “Safe” is about contracepting and STI prevention, but it is also about managing identity.
In her concluding chapter, Garcia writes, “I could not help wondering what their sex education experiences would have been like had they been given an opportunity to share with adults making sex education decisions for them what they felt they needed to learn” (p. 156). Garcia’s book provides an important education for any sex educators who might read it. The book is valuable for scholars and graduate students interested in ethnography and intersections of race, ethnicity, gender, generation, and sexual identity. I will use this book in my upper-level undergraduate class on sexualities; several students have already expressed interest.