"<i>Puta Life</i> 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, <i>Puta Life</i> 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. <i>Puta Life</i> urgently demonstrates that the topic of sex work must be seriously taken up in all these fields."<br /> - Yessica Garcia Hernandez (GLQ) "Both educative and intimate, <i>Puta Life</i> 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)
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