Puta Life

“In this beautifully crafted and impressive work, Juana María Rodríguez considers the range of biographical self-representations across various media that document and affirm the lives of sex workers who seek to make themselves knowable and known. The photos and stories read in this powerful text offer testimonies to their lives that resist any effort to efface or degrade their aging bodies and sexuality. Rodríguez brings heart into everything she writes here, expanding an understanding and capacity for work and love, for life and sorrow, and for those pleasures that emerge precisely from those sites where life is hardest.” - Judith Butler, author of The Force of Nonviolence: An Ethico-Political Bind

“Puta Life demonstrates why Juana María Rodríguez is the foremost theorist of Latina sexuality. Rodríguez cultivates a remarkable visual archive of putas, from nineteenth-century photographs to contemporary visual media, while writing of their ‘spectacular sexuality’ with care and adoration. A powerful and remarkable read, Puta Life is an essential study devoted to the vitality of Latina/x sexual laborers who work to affirm life against all odds.” - Deborah R. Vargas, author of Dissonant Divas in Chicana Music: The Limits of La Onda

"As a methodological framework, Rodríguez’ work of love and queer affective kinships present us an agential reading of those who live in excess. In the image of the puta, she implicates us all. . . . I am now glad to say, like Juana Maria Rodríguez, I am also a puta." - Sam Dolores Sanchinel, Graduate History Review

"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

"Rodríguez offers an expansive, creatively wrought treatise on the politics of representing sex work, the processes by which the stigma that so stubbornly attaches to non-normative and racialized subjects becomes 'a visual phenomenon,' 'a bodily sign' (2). . . . Rodríguez boldly analyzes the aesthetics and semantics of depictions of sex workers and otherwise sexually deviant Latina subjects in pornography, state records, graphic novels, social media, biographies, and photojournalism." - Meg Weeks, A Contracorriente

"Rodriguez has broadened the possibilities for scholarly investigations of sex work. . . ." - Asher Firestone, Feminist Formations