Juana María Rodríguez is a cultural critic, public speaker, and award-winning author who writes about sexual cultures, racial politics, and the many tangled expressions of Latina identity. She is the author of Puta Life: Seeing Latinas, Working Sex (Duke UP 2023); Sexual Futures, Queer Gestures, and Other Latina Longings (NYU Press 2014); Queer Latinidad: Identity Practices, Discursive Spaces (NYU Press, 2003) and a co-edited Special Issue of TSQ: Trans Studies Quarterly on “Trans en las Américas.” Her writing engages the interface between sexual practices and public life through archives that traverse the worlds of politics, pleasures, and the wild conjurings of imagination. Writing in a style that is both explicitly erotic and overtly political, her work touches on queer and trans lives; social justice activism; queer kink; sexual labor; Latinx visual culture; social media; and aging. A winner of the Kessler Prize from The Center for Gay and Lesbian Studies’ for her lifelong contributions to the field of LGBT Studies, and the recipient of the prestigious Berlin Prize, her work has been translated into Spanish, Portuguese, German, and Greek.
A Professor of Ethnic Studies; Performance Studies; and Gender and Women’s Studies at UC Berkeley, she currently serves as a co-editor of GLQ: A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies.
At the University of California, Berkeley, Professor Rodríguez is affiliated faculty with the Berkeley Center for New Media; the Center for Race and Gender; the Center for Latin American Studies; the Latinx Research Center; the Haas Institute for Othering and belonging: LGBTQ Citizen Cluster; the Center for the Study of Sexual Cultures; the Designated Emphasis in Critical Theory; and the Designated Emphasis in Women, Gender, and Sexuality. 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.