ESSAY by JUANA MARÍA RODRÍGUEZ
Like so many other feminine subjects, by the time I became a teenager, I had already been warned about not dressing like a puta by my mother, hailed as a spic slut by my school mates, ogled, pinched, groped, and treated as an object for someone else’s pleasure by the adult men around me. In other words, I had already been assigned the category of puta by the world and only had to identify my relationship to it. As a word, puta can stand in for sex worker, prostitute, slut, bitch, and sometimes it is used to simply mean woman. When it is gendered in the masculine as puto, it can reference male sex workers, but most frequently collapses into simply a synonym for faggot, another feminine subject of unrestrained and shameful sexuality. But reader, you probably already know this, as the Spanish word puta needs no translation. Like the word macho, the other term for excessive latinized gender, puta has already entered the official lexicon of American English.
My new book Puta Life: Seeing Latinas, Working Sex, (Duke University Press, 2023) explores how this ubiquitous figure of the puta has emerged across centuries and continents to produce our contemporary understanding of Latina sexuality. Mining the archival traces of colonialism and empire, I linger with the faces of the real-life women I found there to speculate on how phantasmic projections of sexual labor and the social deviance it registers are projected onto all of us that are female and femme, sexual and unashamed. Along the way, the book considers how our own sexual archives of feeling might inform how we read, understand, and sense puta life.