Juana María
Rodríguez

This presentation probes changing sexual cultures across a life span to traffic in the voyeuristic pleasures offered by a glimpse into the erotic life of another. Organized like a glossary, the presentation pairs a word or phrase with a brief affirmation that explores the ways sexual meaning is encoded in language. Written as abbreviated assertions rather than precise definitions, these are combined with autobiographical fragments that exemplify the ways gender, culture, age, geography, and the queer contours of a sexual life are revealed in real world exchanges.

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. 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). A Professor of Ethnic Studies and Performance Studies at UC Berkeley, she is a recipient of The Center for Gay and Lesbian Studies’ Kessler Award for her lifetime contributions to the field, as well as the prestigious Berlin Prize. Her second book Sexual Futures, Queer Gestures and Other Latina Longings won the Alan Bray Memorial Book Prize presented by the GL/Q Caucus of the Modern Language Association and was a Finalist for the 2015 LGBT Studies Award presented by the Lambda Literary Foundation. An international public speaker, her work touches on sexual politics, Latinx pop culture, queer kink, feminist politics, digital cultures, and sexuality and aging and has been translated into Spanish, Portuguese, Greek and German.