Abstract
Lorena Garcia, Respect Yourself, Protect Yourself: Latina Girls and Sexual Identity, New York University Press: New York and London, 2012; xi + 219 pp.: ISBN 978 0 8147 3317 2, $24.00 (pbk), ISBN 978 0 8147 6991 1 (e-book)
In this groundbreaking book, Lorena Garcia challenges dominant discourses that historically pathologize young, working-class Latinas as hyper-sexual beings prone to teen pregnancy. Through ethnographic methods she illuminates a complex picture of how Latina youth creatively negotiate their emerging sexual experiences and identities at the intersections of race, ethnicity, class, and generational status. Rather than focusing on the negative outcomes of young Latina women's sexuality, Garcia examines how Latina youth understand their sexuality and how they comprehend and practice sexual safety and pleasure. Garcia identifies sexual respectability as a key mediating strategy Latina youth employ to navigate a hostile sexual landscape that does not recognize them as sexual actors. For those who study young (Latina) women's sexual lives Garcia's innovative analysis of how they maintain sexual respectability while practicing safe sex unleashes fresh insights regarding the sexual agency and subjectivity of young (Latina) women.
Set in Chicago, Garcia walks us through the sexual lives of second-generation, working class, Mexican and Puerto Rican young women who self-identify as practicing safe sex (lesbian and heterosexual). The first chapter brings into light the importance of asking questions that seek to unravel how young Latinas themselves understand their own sexuality and what it means to practice safe sex. Through the framework of intersectionality, such questions harness untold stories that expose the ways in which “gender, sexual, and racial/ethnic inequalities” (p. 17) outline the limitations and possibilities for Latina's sexual subjectivities. In Chapter 2, Garcia calls into question the often-cited culture of silence surrounding sexuality within Latina/o communities. She draws on interviews with Latina mothers to unpack the strategies they utilize to talk to their daughters after they learn that their daughters are sexually active. Respectable femininity is the central strategy the mothers used not only to offer their daughters sexual guidance, but also to negotiate their identities as Mexican and Puerto Rican women.
In Chapter 3, Garcia explores the race-gendered stereotypes that structure the sexual (mis)education of Latinas in school. She discusses how teachers' heteronormative assumptions and the good-girl/bad-girl dichotomy impede relevant sexuality education. Through her analysis of the multiple intersecting identities of the young Latinas, Garcia highlights how their sexual respectability is intertwined with their future educational and career aspirations.
Chapter 4 examines how the young women maintain their sexual respectability through race/gendered sexual boundaries where they differentiate themselves from other Latina girls whom they interpret to be ‘skanks’ and ‘hos,’ or ‘baby mommas’ (p. 94). The fifth chapter discusses how young Latinas simultaneously draw from sexual respectability and socially sanctioned notions of masculinity and femininity to negotiate safe-sex practices with their partners. Garcia points out that while such strategies help them practice safe sex, the Latinas also reinforce the sexual and gender inequalities they face as urban women of color. In the final chapter, Garcia invokes the urgency for creating relevant sexuality education for Latina youth, one that is connected to the local community and involves parents. This recommendation has strong implications for educators and other practitioners who work with Latina youth. Respect Yourself, Protect Yourself is written in an accessible style for practitioners, educators, and scholars. It is clear and concise yet deep with complex portrayals that debunk stereotypes about young Latinas’ sexuality. She also uses stories from her fieldwork to introduce and foreshadow the contents of each chapter, but what sets this book apart from other works regarding Latina youth and their sex lives is Garcia's innovative development of her social inquiry “into meaning-making” (p. 8). Her focus on agency is a useful approach in studying Latina youth and sexuality because it goes beyond interpreting Latinas’ sexual experiences through culturally deterministic frameworks. She garners a rigorous analysis in which culture is reimagined as a ‘tool kit’ (p. 8) that Latina youth draw from to construct their sexual identities and practices. Invoking culture as a set of resources makes visible the social structures from which young Latinas decide which resources and strategies to use, why they use them, and what socio-cultural conditions must change so that they have new possibilities from which to negotiate their sexual subjectivity in transformative ways.
The inclusion of the mothers’ perspectives is another strength in Garcia's analytical approach because it fosters a richer account of Latinas’ sexual lives. However, the voices of fathers, partners and teachers could have further illuminated how interactions and relationships factor into the young women's negotiations of sexual meaning, practices, and resources. Nonetheless, this text presents a handy example of a nuanced intersectional analysis that readers across disciplines will appreciate. Garcia's intersectional lens reveals how the sexual identities of young Latinas and the formation of their race-gendered identities act as interlocked processes that shape their sexual subjectivity and agency. This book a must read for undergraduate and graduate students, and scholars working in the areas of Latina youth, identity and agency, and adolescent sexuality.