Puta Life: Seeing Latinas, Working Sex

by Juana María Rodríguez

Overview

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 sex work's stigmatization and criminalization—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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781478019497
Publisher:	Duke University Press
Publication date:	04/07/2023
Series:	Dissident Acts
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

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.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments  vii
Introduction  1
Part I. Archival Encounters and Affective Traces: Visual Genealogies of Puta Life
1. Women in Public: Biopolitics, Portraiture, and Poetics  37
2. Colonial Echoes and Aesthetic Allure: Tracking the Genres of Puta Life  68
Part II. Visions, Voices, and Impressions Left Behind: Representing Puta Life
3. Carnal Knowledge, Interpretive Practices: Authorizing Vanessa del Rio  107
4. Touching Alterity: The Women of Casa Xochiquetzal  140
5. Seeing, Sensing, Feeling: Adela Vázquez’s Amazing Past  180
Epilogue: Toward a Conclusion That Does Not Die or a Subject That Is Allowed to Live  211
Notes  215
References  243
Index  259

What People are Saying About This

The Force of Nonviolence: An Ethico-Political Bind - Judith Butler

“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.”

Dissonant Divas in Chicana Music: The Limits of La Onda - Deborah R. Vargas

“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.”

Editorial Reviews

"Both educative and intimate, Puta Life achieves its intervention into the stigma attached to sex workers that has been cast onto all those who are 'female and femme, sexual and unashamed' (15), paving the way for new possibilities of rendering puta life."

Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture - Erin L. McCutcheon

"Puta Life is a rigorous and nuanced contribution to affirming sex workers’ lives. This is reason alone to read it. But I cherish Puta Life because it offered me a new way of sensing my mother’s painful past and my own history of abuse beyond exposure. Above all, Puta Life gifted me with a deep respect for all I can never know about other women’s lives."

Full Stop - Elizabeth Hall

"A groundbreaking contribution to the fields of Latinx, sexuality, queer, porn, fat, and women and feminist studies. Puta Life urgently demonstrates that the topic of sex work must be seriously taken up in all these fields."
 

GLQ - Yessica Garcia Hernandez