Puta Life: Seeing Latinas, Working Sex

November 7, 2023, Tuesday, 6 to 7: 30 pm ET

20 Cooper Square, 4th Floor

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.

This event is free & open to the public. RSVP is required for audience members without an active NYU ID.

For more information about this event, please contact the NYU Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality at csgs@nyu.edu.

Juana María Rodríguez is Professor of Ethnic Studies and Core faculty in 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 three books, Puta Life: Seeing Latinas, Working Sex (Duke UP 2023); 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 Queer Latinidad: Identity Practices, Discursive Spaces (NYU Press, 2003). 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.