Family Secrets: Stories of Incest and Sexual Violence in Mexico (Latina/o Sociology)

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Description

“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 women and men in Mexico who, like Elisa, saw their lives irrevocably changed within the wake of childhood and adolescent incest. In Mexico, a patriarchal, religious society where women are expected to make themselves sexually to be had to men and where same-sex experiences for both women and men 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 circle of relatives 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, relating to 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 women and girls and gender nonconforming boys and men especially liable to sexual abuse. Together, these cultural factors create an excellent storm for generations upon generations of unspoken incest, a cycle that takes great courage and strength to heal from and conquer. A riveting account, Family Secrets turns a feminist and sociological lens on a disturbing trend that has gone unnoticed for a ways too long.

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