Puta Life: Seeing Latinas, Working Sex

Rodríguez’s Academy project is organized around the image of la puta (the whore), the perennial figure of Latinized feminine sexual excess, to trace the figure of the Latina sex worker across a range of texts that combine biography with visual forms of representation. Exploring how diverse visual modes of biographical representation circulate transnationally—for example, official identity papers, illustrated biographies, documentary films, photojournalistic essays, graphic novels, and digital profiles—the project probes moments when narrative voice and photographic representation collide. “Theoretically, this project focuses on how affective encounters with diverse modes of biographical documentation challenge the interpretive practices we bring to accounts of sexuality across the life span,” writes Rodríguez. Pairing visual portraits of Latinas who have worked in the sex industry with biographical and autobiographical accounts of their lives re-inserts the subject and her own articulations of her sexuality over time into the visual artifact, even as it exposes the limits of representation. With the German legalization of sex work in 2002, the country claims the highest number of sex workers per capita, at a time when it is also receiving an increasing number of immigrants, including from Latin America. Rodríguez plans to research Berlin’s queer and alternative sexual cultures, its politically active sex-worker community, and social movements in Berlin that have produced vibrant forms of creative self-representation.