Abstract
Immigrants and their children engage in several forms of boundary making as a means of developing a sense of belonging in America. Second-generation Americans are at the crossroads between meeting their parents’ cultural expectations and selecting new ethnic options that may conflict with ancestral traditions. Women’s sexuality has often been a site for contesting and conforming to ethnic boundaries. This article examines a case study of second-generation South Asian American adult women’s pre-marital sexual behavior to understand how cultural expectations about sex shapes the ways in which they construct ethnic boundaries. Much of the literature on women’s sexuality in immigrant communities in America has focused on married women or constraints placed on women’s virginity. This study highlights a nuanced perspective for understanding how migration to the U.S. creates cultural shifts in ethnic communities by examining how the American born daughters of immigrants define their ethnicity through their pre-marital sexual encounters.
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Bacchus, N.S. Shifting Sexual Boundaries: Ethnicity and Pre-marital Sex in the Lives of South Asian American Women. Sexuality & Culture 21, 776–794 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12119-017-9421-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12119-017-9421-2