Puta Life Rodríguez

Puta Life

Seeing Latinas, Working Sex JUANA MARÍA RODRÍGUEZ

“In this beautifully crafted and impressive work, Juana María Rodríguez considers the range of biographical self-representations across various media that document and affirm the lives of sex workers who seek to make themselves knowable and known. The photos and stories read in this powerful text offer testimonies to their lives that resist any effort to efface or degrade their aging bodies and sexuality. Rodríguez brings heart into everything she writes here, expanding an understanding and capacity for work and love, for life and sorrow, and for those pleasures that emerge precisely from those sites where life is hardest.”—JUDITH BUTLER, author of The Force of Nonviolence: An Ethico-Political Bind

“Puta Life demonstrates why Juana María Rodríguez is the foremost theorist of Latina sexuality. Rodríguez cultivates a remarkable visual archive of putas, from nineteenth-century photographs to contemporary visual media, while writing of their ‘spectacular sexuality’ with care and adoration. A powerful and remarkable read, Puta Life is an essential study devoted to the vitality of Latina/x sexual laborers who work to affirm life against all odds.”—DEBORAH R. VARGAS, author of Dissonant Divas in Chicana Music: The Limits of La Onda

In Puta Life, Juana María Rodríguez probes the ways that sexual labor and Latina sexuality become visual phenomena. Drawing on state archives, illustrated biographies, documentary films, photojournalistic essays, graphic novels, and digital spaces, she focuses on the figure of the puta—the whore, that phantasmatic figure of Latinized feminine excess. Rodríguez’s eclectic archive features the faces and stories of women whose lives have been mediated by the stigma and criminalization surrounding sex work—washerwomen and masked wrestlers, porn stars and sexiles. Rodríguez examines how visual tropes of racial and sexual deviance expose feminine subjects to misogyny and violence, attuning our gaze to how visual documentation shapes perceptions of sexual labor. Throughout this poignant and personal text, Rodríguez brings the language of affect and aesthetics to bear upon understandings of gender, age, race, sexuality, labor, disability, and migration. Highlighting the criminalization and stigmatization that surrounds sex work, she lingers on those traces of felt possibility that might inspire more ethical forms of relation and care.

DISSIDENT ACTS A series edited by Macarena Gómez-Barris and Diana Taylor

O DRÍGUEZ R JUANA MARÍA

L I FE P U T A WORKING SEX SEEING LATINAS,

April 288 pages, 84 color illustrations paper, 978-1-4780-1949-7 $26.95/£22.99 cloth, 978-1-4780-1685-4 $99.95/£90.00

Juana María Rodríguez is Professor of Ethnic Studies, Performance Studies, and Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, and author of Sexual Futures, Queer Gestures, and Other Latina Longings and Queer Latinidad: Identity Practices, Discursive Spaces.