Juana María Rodríguez is Professor of Ethnic Studies, Gender and Women’s Studies, and Performance Studies at UC Berkeley. A graduate of the Ethnic Studies Ph.D. at Berkeley, her research focuses on racialized sexuality and gender; queer of color theory and activism; affect and aesthetics; technology and media arts; law and critical race theory; and Latinx and Caribbean literatures and cultures.  Professor Rodríguez is the author of Queer Latinidad: Identity Practices, Discursive Spaces (NYU Press, 2003); Sexual Futures, Queer Gestures, and Other Latina Longings (NYU Press 2014) which won the Alan Bray Memorial Book Prize at the Modern Language Association and was a Lambda Literary Foundation Finalist for LGBT Studies, and most recently Puta Life: Seeing Latinas, Working Sex (Duke UP 2023) that focuses on visual culture and Latina sexual labor.. She also served as a co-editor of the special issue of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly on “Trans Studies en las Americas.” In addition to her publications in academic journals internationally, her work has been featured in Aperture; on NPR’s Latino USA, NBC.com, Canadian News Network, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and Cosmopolitan for Latinas.

At Berkeley, Professor Rodríguez is affiliated faculty with the Designated Emphasis in Women, Gender, and Sexuality; the Berkeley Center for New Media; the Center for Race and Gender; the Center for Latin American Studies; and the Center for the Study of Sexual Cultures. She is one of the founding members of the Haas Institute’s Center for a Fair and Inclusive Society’s LGBTQ Citizen Cluster and has served on the President’s Advisory Council on LGBT Students, Faculty & Staff for the University of California. She is the proud recipient of the Distinguished Teaching Award from the Division of Social Sciences and a Distinguished Faculty Mentor Award from the Graduate Assembly at UC Berkeley.