Annual Queer Theory Lecture “Biopolitic, Portraiture, and the Poetics of Puta Life”

This year’s Queer Theory Lecture in Honor of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick hosted Professor Juana María Rodríguez, whose lecture “Biopolitic, Portraiture, and the Poetics of Puta Life” comes from a chapter of her forthcoming book project entitled Puta Life: Seeing Latina, Working Sex. This work focuses on how individuals look at, and linger on, images. The chapter she presented analyzes how nineteenth century Mexican state authorities used photography as a way to document and categorize mujeres publicas (sex-workers). Each woman was required to provide a photograph when they registered their location. The Mexican state kept track of these women, documenting their movements to and from hospitals as well as when they entered and left the sex-worker profession.

Rodríguez asserts that novel photographic technology allowed the state not only to identify and track mujeres publicas, but to classify and categorize them. However, Rodríguez attempts to look beyond how the state gazed upon these women in an effort to understand how these women positioned themselves before the camera, to read their individual actions and movements against the state’s archival grain. Rodríguez acknowledges that there are limits to what can be gleaned of these women’s thoughts and feelings from an archive designed to control their self-expression. As such, she uses critical fabulation as a technique to examine her own affective attachment to these women and their images. Ultimately, she states that this is a project of presenting but also one of ‘typing.’ The evening ended with a well-attended reception.