Respect Yourself, Protect Yourself

Latina Girls and Sexual Identity

Lorena Garcia

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780814769911
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Sociologie

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.

1
Introduction

Studying the “Other” Girls

I walked eighteen-year-old Alicia to the reception area of the Chi-Town Health Teen Center after we wrapped up our first interview. I had met the high school senior two weeks earlier when she came in for an appointment to obtain birth control pills. We chatted about our weekend plans as we made our way toward the door, the previously busy waiting room, with its colorful flyers and posters, now empty. One hot-pink flyer shouted, “Come join our teen group!” Another bright-green flyer simply read, “Please ask for your brown bag at the front counter” (each bag contained twelve condoms). A large poster featuring a smiling brown-skinned Latino baby asked, “Have you immunized your child?” In less than thirty minutes, the center would close for the day; the rusted steel folding gate on the outside entrance was already extended at four in the afternoon. Alicia paused in front of the door to cautiously pull back the curtains on the windows of the double doors. Nervously surveying the street, she explained that she did not want to be “busted” by her parents or other relatives as she left the center. She had told her parents that she was going to attend a yearbook club meeting after school on that Friday. Satisfied that she would not be discovered at the Chi-Town Health Teen Center, the confident young Mexican woman quickly said goodbye and stepped outside. I stood in the doorway and watched her briskly walk away as she tightly clutched her backpack straps; I kept an eye on her until she turned a corner a block away.

More than a month after our initial interview, Alicia and a couple of her friends were in the “teen computer lab” at Hogar del Pueblo, another community organization in her Chicago West Town neighborhood on the city’s Near Northwest Side. Alicia participated in a youth program there. On that unseasonably warm October afternoon, the three young women had the computer lab to themselves, since the rest of their peers were hanging out in the gym or in the youth lounge, where typically they listened to hip hop or reggaeton music, played pool, or just sat on couches or tables to talk. Despite having access to at least ten unused computers that afternoon, Alicia and her friends were tightly gathered around her computer monitor, concentrating on a Planned Parenthood website. They were doing homework, so they said, for a class project on health; I was already in the computer lab editing a “youth program” flyer as part of my volunteer service at Hogar del Pueblo. “Well, it says that the pill is like almost 99 percent effective,” one of Alicia’s friends said as she pointed to the screen. “But,” without looking away from the screen, Alicia quickly responded, “you gotta be able to take it every day.” Clicking onto other links, she furrowed her brow and tightened her lips as she and her friends continued to discuss the effectiveness of different birth control options for the next forty minutes. At one point, Alicia seemed to hold back tears as her lips slightly trembled. Immediately, one of her friends gave her a reassuring hug and squeezed her arm. Witnessing this exchange, I felt my stomach drop slightly as I wondered if Alicia had forgotten to take a birth control pill and now worried that she was pregnant. She left before I had a chance to ask her if she was all right.

I found out why Alicia was upset a week later when we sat down for our second interview. With anger in her voice, she said that her fourteen-year-old sister and she had been fighting over whose turn it was to wash the dishes when her sister suddenly told their parents that Alicia had a boyfriend. “They started trippin’ and yellin’ at me because they don’t let us have boyfriends,” she told me tearfully. “My dad is always like, ‘You can’t have a boyfriend until you’re like thirty,’ which is really stupid!” The next day, Alicia came home from school to find the bedroom she shared with her sister turned inside out. Her mother, having just scoured the bedroom, sat on Alicia’s bed. “She was like, ‘I’m only gonna ask you this once and you better tell me the truth, have you had sexual relations with your boyfriend?’ I was like, ‘Nope,’ and acted like I didn’t know what she was talking about.” Relieved that her mother had not discovered her birth control pills or condoms hidden between some books, Alicia told me, “She probably would’ve sent me to Mexico or something crazy like that if she found them!” In the wake of that confrontation, Alicia opted to use the Depo-Provera shot after researching birth control methods with her friends. This was the “class project on health” they were doing the day I saw them together in the Hogar del Pueblo computer lab. Picking at a loose thread on the wrist of her worn sweater, Alicia confided, “To tell you the truth, I really don’t want to be using the shot ’cause some of the stuff I read about it freaks me out. … But at least my mom can’t find out. Like with the pills, there’s always a chance. And I keep my condoms in my school locker now, she can’t be all up in my business there.” She continued, “I know that people think that girls my age shouldn’t be bothering with sex right now because of this or that.” Pausing, she then insisted, “But that’s like saying that we have no sexual feelings, which ain’t true! I thought a lot about it [sex] before doing anything and made sure I knew how to take care myself. No one made me do anything.” Alicia’s experiences in making choices about and gaining access to safe-sex resources highlight just some of the challenges Latina girls face in their efforts to practice safe sex.¹

The Latina girls I came to know, like Alicia, told me about their efforts to sexually “take care” of themselves or “handle” their business and the challenges they encounter in doing so, exhibiting behaviors and perspectives that do not quite fit into the prevailing idea that the sexuality of young women, particularly that of girls of color, is a social problem. Many may resist picturing what this entails for a teenage girl, especially for a young woman of color, because of the firmly held expectation and belief that they should abstain from sexual activities until marriage or at least until they are more mature and responsible. Others may acknowledge that young women are sexual beings and assert that if they are going to engage in sexual activities, they should practice safe sex, but without any real consideration of exactly what this demands of girls.² For instance, the simple act of opening the door to a health center requires girls to negotiate their own understanding of their sexuality, as well as to reckon with what others expect of them or think of their sexuality. The conversations and exchanges I had with Latina girls and some of their mothers during two years of fieldwork for this book reveal that there is an untold story about Latina youth and sexuality, one that goes beyond their pregnancy, birth, and STD rates.

This book evolved out of my experiences working with pregnant and parenting teenage girls at a Chicago-area teen health center from the mid-to late 1990s. This was my first job after graduating from college, and I was eager to roll up my sleeves and to put my sociology degree to use in my community. I came to know and learn from a tremendous group of women at the center—midwives, nurses, medical assistants, licensed clinical social workers, case managers, health educators, and intake receptionists—who were all committed to providing quality, affordable, and accessible health care and social services to young people. As at many other nonprofit organizations that serve poor and low-income communities, the staff had to be flexible in terms of the tasks individuals took on to meet the needs of the young people, predominantly Latina/o youth, who walked through our doors. Thus, in addition to my case manager duties for the pregnant and parenting teen program, I sometimes worked with girls at the center who were not pregnant or parenting but who were there for any of a variety of other services. They were brave young women seeking safe-sex resources, HIV testing, or information about their sexual and reproductive health care rights or just looking for someone to listen to them and reassure them of their right to dream about and pursue promising futures.

These girls are doing some of the very things that we often say we want young people to do when concerns about their ability to make informed sexual choices are raised. But these are not the young women we usually talk to in our development of research, policy, and program efforts to address the negative sexual outcomes that disproportionately impact young women of color. Instead, we tend to focus on identifying and correcting the “problematic” sexual behavior of girls of color. We want to know answers to the following types of questions: Why do they get pregnant? Why do they have sex so young? Why do they get STDs? And why do they not practice safe sex? These questions, of course, are important and deserve our attention, but not all of it. My interactions with Latina youth at the health center made me realize that we know very little about other dimensions of their sexual lives, such as their understandings of and approaches to safe sex. My questions and concerns about these “other” girls followed me to graduate school and informed what would become the topic of Respect Yourself, Protect Yourself.

The Crisis in Youth Sexuality Research

The sexuality of young people, particularly girls’ sexual behavior, has generally been approached as a crisis. The dominant stance in our society on the sexuality of teenage girls is that of a problem: “sexually active” girls are promiscuous, engage in unprotected sex, get pregnant, have children, and thus find themselves socially, economically, and educationally deprived and disadvantaged.³ Undeniably, these are serious consequences that should not be taken lightly. Nevertheless, this approach to studying girls’ sexuality is problematic and limiting in several ways. First, research on the sexuality of young people predominantly fixates on girls, thereby continuing to place the burden of the “problem” of pregnancy and STDs onto young women. Second, because the focus on girls is encoded in a racial scheme, sexually active young women of color become, in effect, the problem itself.⁴ If we look closely at the “crisis” framing of girls’ sexuality, it becomes clear that we are talking about not all groups of girls but African American and Latina girls specifically. Third, quite often this research conflates sexuality and pregnancy.⁵ This narrow perspective has led to an overpowering emphasis on pregnancy prevention, with inadequate attention paid to the meanings that youth assign to their sexuality.⁶ And, yet, as the sociologist Janice M. Irvine argues, it is precisely these meanings that can allow us to unpack the myriad ways in which youth negotiate their sexuality and sexual experiences.⁷

This book explores the meaning and practice of sexuality in the lives of Latina girls. Through a focus on their sexual agency, it explains the processes by which some Latina girls engage ideas about safe sex and choose to enact self-protective sexual practices and, more important, how this relates to their understanding and negotiation of their emerging sexuality. This book shows that Latina girls’ sexual lives are complicated and involve a confrontation with racism, patriarchal and heterosexual privilege, and socioeconomic marginality. Drawing on twenty-four months of ethnographic research and interviews with second-generation Mexican and Puerto Rican young women and their mothers, Respect Yourself, Protect Yourself highlights the challenges that emerge for Latina girls when they seek to practice safe sex while still maintaining their claim to a respectable femininity in a larger sociocultural context in which they are not recognized as sexual actors. I found that central to their strategies for negotiating the contradictions and dilemmas they faced as sexual actors who are young, working class, and Latina was the notion of sexual respectability.

Women of color have historically been sexually stereotyped in the United States. For instance, African American women have been depicted as sexually aggressive and uncontrollable, Latinas as sexually provocative and hypersexual, and Asian women as sexually submissive, “dragon ladies,” or a combination of the two. Despite the differences in the stereotypes associated with each group, these constructions have all rested upon the idea of the moral superiority of white women, specifically middle-and upper-class white women. Scholars who have focused on the connections among gender, sexuality, and race/ethnicity have documented how racialized communities elaborate on ideas about morality to challenge negative depictions of women of color.⁸ These scholars have demonstrated how some of these communities articulate and present a “politics of respectability” that is especially anchored in the sexual integrity of women of color as a way to either reflect the community’s sexual values as similar to those of white middle-and upper-class culture or to claim superiority over the dominant society. Importantly, this work has highlighted the ways in which this strategy to counter racism has also exacerbated the inequalities that women and LGBTQ-identified individuals experience both within and outside their communities, pointing to a need to better understand how different members of the same community may experience a politics of respectability. This book expands on and contributes to this scholarship by accounting for the ways in which second-generation Mexican and Puerto Rican girls engage a politics of respectability in their formation of sexual identities, particularly their sexual subjectivities.

Gender and Sexuality as Social Constructs

Sexual subjectivity is a productive point of entry through which to investigate girls’ meanings of sexuality and safe sex, as well as the strategies they develop in relation to these meanings.⁹ The developmental psychologist Deborah L. Tolman posits sexual subjectivity as a “person’s experience of herself as a sexual being, who feels entitled to sexual pleasure and sexual safety, who makes active sexual choices, and who has an identity as a sexual being.”¹⁰ Attending to how girls form their sense of themselves as sexual beings brings to the foreground their sexual agency, which refers to the ability to make choices about one’s own body and to control and modify one’s sexual practices. It includes deciding whether and how to act on sexual feelings.¹¹ Research has consistently shown that girls across various groups often have a difficult time acknowledging themselves as sexual subjects and enacting their sexual agency in empowering ways.¹² In general, girls’ descriptions of their sexual experiences and feelings reflect a perception of themselves as sexual objects, rather than as sexual subjects. That is, they tend to see sex as something that just happens to them, rather than something that they decide on or desire. Previous studies have identified some of the mechanisms that contribute to girls’ limited sexual subjectivity, such as mother-daughter communication about sex, age at sexual initiation, sexual double standards, and a culture and ideology of love and romance, providing further evidence that the gender patterns we often observe in relation to sexuality, far from simply reflecting biologically rooted “drives,” are produced by social practices.

I analyze the social processes that shape Latina girls’ sexual experiences and relevant identity formations. A social constructionism theoretical framework informs my investigation of Latina girls’ gender and sexuality. This perspective on both gender and sexuality has proved to be fruitful in advancing new knowledge and questions. Research guided by this theoretical position has challenged the assumption that gender and sexuality are naturally occurring categories by exposing the ways particular meanings are assigned to these categories and how they are utilized to organize our social world in ways that privilege some groups and disadvantage others. The “doing gender” approach is one such social constructionist theorization that has shed light on how gender is understood to be something that women and men accomplish in social interaction. Rather than attending to gender as traits and behaviors that individuals possess, this approach analyzes gender as a situated accomplishment that is influenced by accountability. That is, it views social interactions as involving judgments about how individuals meet expectations of appropriate feminity and masculinity, so that the people involved in a given exchange within a certain context are aware that they are being evaluated on their adherence to gender prescriptions.¹³ By attending to how men and women “do gender” and, more recently, how they “undo gender” in social interactions, as well as by exploring the social construction of gender at the level of identities and institutions and the integration of all of these approaches, feminist sociologists have been able to convincingly argue that it is gender inequality that creates gender differences, not the other way around.¹⁴

Sexuality scholars in disciplines such as sociology and history and in interdisciplinary fields such queer studies and race/ethnic studies have also demonstrated that sexuality, far from being just an aspect of one’s identity, is given shape and meaning by larger social, political, and historical forces that are marked by struggles for power.¹⁵ For instance, critiquing heterosexuality as a phenomenon that is often taken for granted in theoretical and empirical work on sexuality, several scholars have interrogated heterosexuality and made evident some of the ways in which heterosexuality is organized, maintained, and reproduced in our society.¹⁶ Thus, a key insight of a social construction framework has been an explication of how gender and sexuality constitute modes of inequality that structure experiences and opportunities. Some scholarship grounded in this theoretical stance has also challenged the assumption of a natural relationship between gender and sexuality in which gender is perceived as automatically dictating the expression of sexuality or sexual identity. The poststructuralist philosopher, Judith Butler, for example, conceptualizes gender as a performance that is limited by the rules of normative heterosexuality.¹⁷ According to Butler, the repetition of heteronormative gender performances serves to reinforce our understanding and acceptance of gender as a neat, dichotomous category. This theorization of gender also invites us to consider sexuality (along with sex) as performative. As the anthropologist Gayle Rubin asserts, while gender and sexuality do seem to influence one ano...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• 1 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”
• 5 Playing Lil’ Games Partners and Safe-Sex Strategies
• 6 Conclusion
• Index