In discussing how Chicana intellectuals and her female interviewees re-signify what these four iconic symbols of Mexicana/Chicana identity mean to them, Blake draws on Stuart Hall's notion of transcoding, where a person may reinterpret a (negative) representation and give it a new, more empowering meaning. This also acknowledges the audience's agency. The purpose of the book is to re-member the voices of women, first by tracing how these women have appeared and been discussed; then how Chicana

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... ntellectuals have re-membered them as a form of empowerment; and, finally, how the ordinary women interviewed have made similar use of these icons. For example, many of the women interviewed in the book did not interpret La Virgen de Guadalupe's suffering to mean that they must resign themselves to silent suffering beside their husband; one woman acknowledged the icon as being a mother role model who suffered, but did not view this as a reason to suffer physical abuse from a husband. Blake, a self-identified U.S. white woman who began this research as an economically struggling graduate student of working-class background, is often selfreflective and self-aware during her research, identifying the power differentials between her subjects and herself. At the end of the book she further discusses her positionality, addressing the obstacles posed by her knowledge of Spanish as a second language, differences in race and education level, as well the change in her status from graduate student to professor. To sum up, Blake makes an important contribution not only to the literature on Chicana identity and sexuality, but also to the field of oral history and audience interpretation analysis. Chicana Sexuality and Gender is informative, well written, and enjoyable for anyone in the fields of Chicana/o Studies or Women's Studies, as well as for anyone grappling with the methodological problematics of ethnography or interviewing.