Carnal Knowledge: Vanessa del Rio: 50 Years of Slightly Slutty Behavior

Using the biography,Vanessa del Rio: Fifty Years of Slightly Slutty Behavior, this paper considers how images and text function as complicated triggers for the attachments, identifications, desires, and traumas of our own corporeal embodiments and sexual histories. It reflects on those moments, when as readers and viewers, we encounter the limits of our own understandings of pleasure in our attempt to make meaning out of the experiences of another.

BIO
Juana María Rodríguez is Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, where she is also core faculty in the Graduate Group in Performance Studies. She is the author of Sexual Futures, Queer Gestures, and Other Latina Longings (2014) and Queer Latinidad: Identity Practices, Discursive Spaces (2003). This presentation is based on a new book project on how the juxtaposition of images and auto/biographical forms of narrative shape the representation of sex workers.