Puta Life: Seeing Latinas, Working Sex (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9781478016854)

In Puta Life, Juana Mar? Rodr?uez 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. Rodr?uez'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. Rodr?uez 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, Rodr?uez 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.

Author: Juana Mar? Rodr?uez
ISBN-10: 147801685X
ISBN-13: 9781478016854
Publisher: Duke University Press
Language: English
Published: 04/07/2023
Pages: 288
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 1.50lbs
Size: 9.21h x 6.22w x 0.79d