
Puta Life
Seeing Latinas, Working Sex
Juana Maria Rodriguez(Author)
Duke University Press
Published on 7. April 2023
Book
Paperback/Softback
288 pages
978-1-4780-1949-7 (ISBN)
Description
In Puta Life, Juana MarIa RodrIguez 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. RodrIguez'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. RodrIguez 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, RodrIguez 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.
Reviews / Votes
"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." - Elizabeth Hall (Full Stop) "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."- Yessica Garcia Hernandez (GLQ) "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." - Erin L. McCutcheon (Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture)
More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
North Carolina
United States
Target group
Professional and scholarly
Product notice
Paperback (trade)
Illustrations
84 color illustrations
Dimensions
Height: 365 mm
Width: 238 mm
Thickness: 2 mm
Weight
555 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-4780-1949-7 (9781478019497)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions

E-Book
03/2023
1st Edition
De Gruyter
€35.49
Available for download
Person
Juana MarIa RodrIguez 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.
Content
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 VAzquez'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
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 VAzquez'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