The Ontologies of Putas: Feeling the Visual Archive of Sex Work and Working Sex

In Spanish-speaking countries the quotidian use of the word puta represents the latinized feminine excess that is shamed, stigmatized, and criminalized for aberrant sexuality. In English, puta translates to whore and can also stand in for sex worker, prostitute, slut, hooker, bitch, and or simply woman. In her book Puta Life: Seeing Latinas, Working Sex, Juana María Rodríguez resignifies the word puta to trace its linguistic possibilities. Using theories of stigmatization, affect, performance, and visuality, Rodríguez investigates how the stigma of "putahood" gets placed onto the flesh. For Rodríguez, visuality is a critical method by how social stigma is placed onto the body. In this book, Rodríguez demonstrates that the medium of photography has trained us to identify aberrant sexuality. All the chapters in the book deal with a visual archive and investigate how images of puta life are placed within "regimes of sexual surveillance and spectatorship" (16). What is unique about the book is that it takes a hemispheric approach to Latinx sexualities, and it traces the word puta to Cuba, Mexico, Latin American, and Puerto Rico, among other places. The book investigates both the historical and contemporary currents that offer representations of putas and bind sexual labor to visuality.The book opens with a rich set of questions that asks us to think more expansively about what constitutes sex work. Typically, we define sex work as an exchange of sexual labor for money; but what if we rethink what counts as sex: does that change what sex work is and who is a sex worker? As Rodríguez writes, If just "talking" about sex is considered sex work in one instance, are the vocalized sexual narratives we share within the context of a therapeutic exchange, a staged performance, or academic discourse also forms of sexual labor? And if we interrogate the limits and possibilities of the category of sex, might we also need to investigate what constitutes work, remuneration, and payment? How might the sexual labor we perform within romantic relationships including marriage, also function as a kind of sexual labor, performed in exchange for social status, jewelry, or domestic harmony? (14)At the core of these questions, and throughout the book, Rodríguez interrogates uneven registers of power and how they are performed and navigated.The book is divided in two parts. The first focuses on the archives of deviance and desire and the ways that state archives haunt the figure of the puta. The second unit explores three case studies that move to another affective register in the archive, that of memory, longing, biography, and friendship. In both units Rodríguez is invested in analyzing the politics and limits of representing sex work and imagining a corrective of the shortcoming of biographical representation. Methodologically, Rodríguez pushes the limits of state archives by doing an affective reading of photography and documentary. The rich primary texts that Rodríguez examines pay close attention to storytelling and how the biographical is crafted and retold by others and her.Another strength of the methodology of the book is Rodríguez's positionality—her commitment to include her own voice and puta story as more queer evidence that allows her to read the archive through a unique lens. Rodríguez is a self-identifying puta herself, and her voice appears in the book through her own confessions, vulnerability, imagination, and affective investments in the stories that she writes about. This positionality is a queer and feminist methodology that works perfectly in the book, as it allows us to see the rich dynamics of the politics of knowledge production—the photographer and photographed, the worker and client, the scholar and reader, the scholar's public life and private life. It is her own identification with the archive, her own desire to see pieces of herself in the archive that makes this book so uniquely powerful. Other putas, like myself, in the academy and beyond, will feel recognized, seen, while providing us with a rich example of how to document and write about Latina sex work.Chapter 1 starts us off with an analysis of the Registro de mujeres publicas (1865), one of the earliest archival records of sex work in Mexico. This state database kept a record of five hundred women working sex in nineteenth-century Mexico. The women were divided into three categories of sex work. Each entry consisted of a number assigned to the woman, a photograph, and a biography. Rodríguez argues that the registry used the sex workers' photographs as a disciplinary visual modality that facilitated the work of state surveillance. It was through the interplay of visuality and biography that the registry turned the women into sexual commodities and established its own authority to regulate them. Rodríguez offers a queer reading of the archive through what she calls feeling fugitivity and a queer imaginative reading of Felix Rojas, a masculine-presenting sex worker in the archive, through a lens of possibility and speculation of the ways that gender was disrupted and presented during this time period. This chapter invites us to "feel" photographs to reimagine the complex relationships between images, power, subjects, and the state. Rodríguez demonstrates the interconnections between sex work, empire, technology, and the state.Chapter 2 offers a survey of photographic work, noting how it has constructed our perception of sexuality, particularly how it makes visible or occludes sex work (103). Rodríguez moves from feeling photographs to focusing on who produced the images and how the photographers' feelings attached ideas to the signification of puta life. She explores how meaning becomes attached to the body by the photographers and how the puta then becomes yoked to Latinidad. This chapter centers speculation, ambiguity, and suspicion as critical tools that can help us identify Latinidad.Chapter 3 moves to an analysis of the biographical book of one of the most cherished puta icons in pornography, Afro-Latina Vanessa del Rio, who was famous in adult films of the 1970s and 1980s. Her unique biography, Vanessa del Rio, Fifty Years of Slutty Behavior, is a mixture of biography, explicit rawness, and self-accounts of her experience in the porn industry and experiencing sex. The multimodal structure of the book—the shift between porn, documentary, and biography—challenges the pornographic gaze and asks it to bear witness to the stories of racism, violence, and state-authorized abuse that its sex workers experience. Del Rio is a critical figure in Puta Life, since her philosophies about sex and the way she decides to tell her memories of the industry allow Rodríguez the possibility to create the rich futurity of puta life. Del Rio's refusal to replicate the theme of victimhood, salvation, and redemption that other porn star biographies have engaged in queers how we read power from below. Instead, for Del Rio, the pleasure of sex is a recurring theme in the telling of her story, despite her experience with state violence and the inescapable white gaze. This offers a rich contribution to the field of Latinx sexualities, particularly in reimagining the possibilities of puta life.A powerful contribution of the book is the theme of sex work and Latina aging. Rodríguez is very intentional in thinking about the precarity, humanity, and longevity of sex work. For instance, she shows that, although Vanessa del Rio left the industry in 1985, she is still a "working girl . . . hustling . . . to stay relevant in a business that does not view aging kindly" (108). This analysis is more explicit in the second unit of the book, particularly in chapter 4, where she analyzes the photography and documentary work of Casa Xochiquetzal.Chapter 4 focuses on the photographic work that surrounds Casa Xochiquetzal, a Mexico City–based shelter for aging sex workers. The analytical reading that stands out in this chapter is found in Rodríguez's commitment to finding and feeling friendships in the archive. After analyzing several of the photographic books that exist about Casa Xochiquetzal, Rodríguez moves to the storytelling medium of documentary and offers a reading of Plaza de la Soledad (2016) by Mexican photographer and filmmaker Maya Goded. Her analysis of the queer potential of femme friendships between the documentarian Goded and the subjects in the film demonstrates how a different gaze is possible when there is a commitment to feeling and making community in the process of storytelling. Friendships in sex work and the representation of sex work offer love, tenderness, and care. It is in this chapter where we feel Rodríguez's own positionality the most, particularly in her emotive reading of the photographs of these aging sex workers. The aging sex workers allow Rodríguez to reflect on her own realities and desire, sex, and puta life.In the last chapter of the book, we are reminded that an examination of Puta life requires a creative engagement with the biographical. It is about the story as much as it is about how the story is told, and the feelings that emerge when you read the story through its visual companions. Chapter 5 offers an analysis of the life narrative of Bay Area trans activist Adela Vásquez, who engaged in sex work for a brief moment in her life. Rodríguez studies Adela's life story through the bilingual graphic narrative Sexile/Sexilio (2004) by Jaime Cortez. Adela's life story includes childhood memories of sexual encounters with animals, trees, and other boys, and her experiences of how sex work allowed Adela to survive living in the United States. At a very early age in Cuba, Adela learned that sex and beauty created power for her. Adela learned to work sex and to make the best of bad situations, and it is this desire-based reading of Adela's life that makes Rodríguez's analysis of her puta life so rich. In fact, a powerful queer moment in the book takes place in this chapter, when Rodríguez juxtaposes Adela Vásquez's life alongside Vanessa del Rio's theorization against victimhood, providing a raw engagement with the complexities of writing about sexuality and having to reckon with sexual trauma. The question that she raises at this moment of the book—"How do I situate my unease and discomfort alongside her narrative without rewriting her felt experience through my own interpretative lens?" (187)—will help educators and academics who teach about sexuality, and who also wrestle with messy emotions in the biographical confession of their students in the classroom, office hours, and/or autoethnographic assignments. Rodríguez's intentional decision to not victimize Adela or Vanessa, or any of the sex workers that she writes about, shows us the care that she has for the future of the field of Latinx sexualities.As a scholar Juana María Rodríguez has been invested in the futures of Latinx sexualities, and in this book we witness how her previous research led her to arrive at these archives. This "slow sensory encounter" with the archive, as she calls it in the epilogue, is what makes this book 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. The urgent matter at hand is to fight the stigmatization of sex work and sex workers, also known as putas. Rodríguez has offered readings of different texts that create possibilities to reinscribe a different meaning to the word puta, one that is guided by pleasure and fantasy and imagines a world where the sex workers that the book discusses are valued, paid, and humanized. I end with the words that Jaime Cortez uses to describe the importance of Vásquez's life story because I also believe that puta life is often "fucked up, fabulous, raggedy and human" (181)—that is precisely the richness of our lives and why those stories matter.