Juana María Rodríguez is Associate Professor in Gender and Women’s Studies at UC Berkeley and Director of the Designated Emphasis in Women, Gender, and Sexuality. She is the author of Queer Latinidad: Identity Practices, Discursive Space (NYU, 2003). Her recent essays are included in The Companion to Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Studies (Blackwell, 2007); None of the Above: Puerto Ricans in the Global Era (Palgrave, 2007); MELUS (2009); and PMLA (2007).
This presentation, based on Sexual Subjects: Sexual Discourse and the Everyday Politics of Queer Cultural Life, focuses on the everyday lives of sexual subjects to consider the ways sex, sexual pleasure, and sexual practices are deployed in political projects that rethink forms of recognition and sociality. The book considers four distinct areas: intimate sexual practices, kinship relations, public cultures, and state deployments of sexual discourse.
Co-sponsored by the Queer Theory Research Cluster.