Seeing, Sensing, Feeling: Representing Puta Life
Wed, 26 March, 2025
3:00pm - 4:00pm
Drawing on the publication of her recent book, Puta Life: Seeing Latinas, Working Sex (Duke UP, 2023), this talk will explore how different genres of representation–from graphic narratives and oral histories to documentary films and social-media selfies–shape the life stories we consume. As a rumination on the limits and possibilities of representation, it probes the queer things that words do to images and that images do to words in order to confront the ethical quandaries posed by our role as authors and academics in representing the sexual lives of others.
About the Speaker
Juana María Rodríguez is a cultural critic, public speaker, and award-winning author who writes about sexual cultures, racial politics, and the many tangled expressions of Latina identity. A Professor of Ethnic Studies and Performance Studies at UC Berkeley, she is the author of Puta Life: Seeing Latinas, Working Sex (Duke UP 2023); Sexual Futures, Queer Gestures, and Other Latina Longings (NYU Press 2014); and Queer Latinidad: Identity Practices, Discursive Spaces (NYU Press, 2003).