Includes bibliographical references and index.

Women in public : biopolitics, portraiture, and poetics -- Colonial echoes and aesthetic allure : tracking the genres of puta life -- Carnal knowledge, interpretive practices : authorizing Vanessa del Rio -- Touching alterity : the women of Casa Xochiquetzal -- Seeing, sensing, feeling : Adela Vázquez's amazing past -- Toward a conclusion that does not die or a subject that is allowed to live.

"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 the stigma and criminalization surrounding sex work-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 invokes 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"-- Provided by publisher.

"Eternal gratitude to dedicated librarians and archivists everywhere, but especially [...] to Ilya Oehring and the enterprising librarians at the American Academy in Berlin."-- p.XII
"This work was nurtured by provocative engagements with audiences at the American Academy in Berlin."-- p.XII