Overview

“My breasts stopped growing when my grandfather touched them,” confides ‘Elisa’, a young woman who recounts the traumatic incest and sexual abuse she experienced in childhood. In Family Secrets, Gloria González-López tells the life stories of 60 men and women in Mexico who, like Elisa, saw their lives irrevocably changed in the wake of childhood and adolescent incest. In Mexico, a patriarchal, religious society where women are expected to make themselves sexually available to men and where same-sex experiences for both men and women bring great shame, incest is easily hidden, seldom discussed, and rarely reported to authorities. Through gripping, emotional narrative, González-López brings the deeply troubling, hidden, and unspoken issues of incest and sexual violence in Mexican families to light. González-López contends that family and cultural structures in Mexican life enable incest and the culture of silence that surrounds it. She examines the strong bonds of familial obligation between parents and children, brothers and sisters, and elders and youth that, in the case of incest, can morph into sexual obligation; the codes of honor and shame reinforced by tradition and the Church, discouraging openness about sexual violence and trauma; the double standards of morality and stereotypes about sexuality that leave girls and women and gender nonconforming boys and men especially vulnerable to sexual abuse. Together, these cultural factors create a perfect storm for generations upon generations of unspoken incest, a cycle that takes great courage and strength to heal from and overcome. A riveting account, Family Secrets turns a feminist and sociological lens on a disturbing trend that has gone unnoticed for far too long.

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9781479869138

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Reviews

A sensitive, ethical, humane, yet deeply sociological and intellectually robust analysis of a very delicate subject matter. Gloria Gonzalez-Lopez criticizes, debunks, sheds new light, and does so with an immense humanity. Her approach has true potential for bringing attention to this issue with an eye for real change. -Cecilia Menjivar, author of Enduring Violence: Ladina Women's Lives in Guatemala

I have never read a more powerful, highly original, sophisticated, and brave book as Family Secrets. It is an absolutely wonderful and truly riveting ethnographic study that will forever change the way look at gender and sexuality among Mexican-origin populations. Written with enormous compassion and intelligence, it is destined to become the most highly-acclaimed and path-breaking contribution to Latino/a sexuality research to date. -Tomas Almaguer, author of Racial Fault Lines: The Historical Origins of White Supremacy in California

Author Information

Gloria González-López is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of Erotic Journeys: Mexican Immigrants and Their Sex Lives (2005) and co-editor of Bridging: How Gloria Anzaldúa’s Life and Work Transformed Our Own (2011). Born and educated through her undergraduate years in Monterrey, Nuevo León, Mexico, she received her PhD in Sociology from the University of Southern California in 2000.

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