Modernity with limits: The narrative construction of intimacies, sex and social change in Carlos Cuauhtémoc Sánchez’s Juventud en Éxtasis.

In this article, I explore the narrative construction of
sexualities and intimate relationships in the self-help novel Youth in Sexual Ecstasy by Mexican writer Carlos Cuauhtémoc Sánchez. Self-help texts may be understood as being indicative of the reconstitution of the cultural logics of intimate life in relation to processes of modernization and globalization. The popular work
of Cuauhtémoc Sánchez in particular points to respective
cultural transformations and tensions emerging in Latin
American contexts. The text is firmly embedded in the political project of reasserting a hegemonic construction of Mexican sexual identity based on the nation’s patriarchal Christian heritage in the face of social change and tendencies towards a pluralization of sexual understandings and practices.