"<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)

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.
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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
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Produktdetaljer

ISBN
9781478019497
Publisert
2023-04-07
Utgiver
Duke University Press
Vekt
544 gr
Høyde
229 mm
Bredde
152 mm
Aldersnivå
P, 06
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Heftet
Antall sider
288

Biografisk notat

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.