Puta Life

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.

• Acknowledgments  viiIntroduction  1Part I. Archival Encounters and Affective Traces: Visual Genealogies of Puta Life1. Women in Public: Biopolitics, Portraiture, and Poetics  372. Colonial Echoes and Aesthetic Allure: Tracking the Genres of Puta Life  68Part II. Visions, Voices, and Impressions Left Behind: Representing Puta Life3. Carnal Knowledge, Interpretive Practices: Authorizing Vanessa del Rio  1074. Touching Alterity: The Women of Casa Xochiquetzal  1405. Seeing, Sensing, Feeling: Adela VÁzquez’s Amazing Past  180Epilogue: Toward a Conclusion That Does Not Die or a Subject That Is Allowed to Live  211Notes  215References  243Index  259

"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)