In this presentation of her new book project, Puta Life, Seeing Latinas, Working Sex, Dr. Juana María Rodríguez interrogates the role of the visual in representations of Latina sexual subjectivity. Drawing on an eclectic archive of transnational images and her own autobiographical reflections, in this talk, Rodríguez addresses the political urgency of addressing the criminalization and stigma that surrounds sex work. She argues that the aesthetics that attach to sexual labor, always coded through racialized tropes of visuality, inflect the ways feminine bodies who circulate in public are seen, scrutinized, and judged.

Juana María Rodríguez is professor of ethnic studies and Core faculty in performance studies at the University of California, Berkeley, where she is affiliated with the Designated Emphasis in Women, Gender, and Sexuality; Designated Emphasis in Critical Theory; Center for Latin American Studies; Center for Race and Gender; Berkeley Center for New Media; Center for the Study of Sexual Culture; and the Haas Institute for a Fair and Equitable Society. Rodríguez completed her BA at San Francisco State University, MA at Columbia University, and PhD at Berkeley, and has taught at UC Davis and Bryn Mawr College. She is the author of Queer Latinidad: Identity Practices, Discursive Spaces (NYU, 2003) and Sexual Futures, Queer Gestures, and Other Latina Longings (NYU, 2014), which won the MLA’s Alan Bray Memorial Book Prize and was named a finalist in LGBT studies by the Lambda Literary Foundation. In 2019, she served as co-editor for a special issue of TSQ: Trans Studies Quarterly on “Trans en las Americas.”

This workshop will be held via Zoom. Please RSVP to receive Zoom link. >>

Image credit: Henri Cartier-Bresson, "Calle Cuauhtemoctzin, Mexico City" (1934)