Puta Life: Seeing Latinas, Working Sex
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 invokes 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.
“Bold in its political aspirations, tender in its queer feelings, this book is my homage to those whose lives have been marked by the regulatory power of puta life, an opportunity to engage in the reparative potential of images and stories so that we might see ourselves, and each other, anew.” (Puta Life 33)
PRAISE
In this beautifully crafted and impressive work, Juana María Rodríguez considers the range of biographical self-representations across various media that let the lives of sex workers, historically marginal knowable to themselves and to anyone who seeks to know them. The photos and stories read in this powerful text offer testimonies to their lives that resist any effort to efface or degrade their ageing 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. Rodriguez 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