Respect Yourself, Protect Yourself

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.

"Respect Yourself, Protect Yourselfis 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) "Garcia's intersectional analysis is brilliant as she always considers how pattern in mothers' and daughters' responses and actions reflect larger cultural discourses about women, motherhood, sexuality, race, or class. She is careful not to homogenize Latinas. She also carefully deliberates the complex, and sometimes contradictory, ways in which certain responses resist stereotypes or specifically gendered/ raced performances while bolstering instantiations of patriarchy or heteronormativity." - Jenna Vinson (Community Literary Journal) "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. Garcias subjects and their negotiations about their sexual respectabilitybelie 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 "The best book I have read on the formation of sexual subjectivities young urban Latinas assert in an urban, working-class community. Lorena Garcias 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: A Reader "[] [I]t would make excellent reading in courses on a variety of topics, including gender, sexuality, race and ethnicity, social problems, and public health." (Social Forces)

• Introduction: Studying the "Other" Girls 2. She's Old School Like That: Mother and Daughter Sex Talks 3. The Sexual (Mis)Education of Latina Girls 4. Handlin' Your Business: Sexual Respectability and Peers 5. Playing Lil' Games: Partners and Safe-Sex Strategies 6. Conclusion