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 sex work's stigmatization and criminalization-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 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.
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 VÁzquez’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
Juana MarÍa RodrÍguez 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.
