Sexual Futures, Queer Gestures, and Other Latina Longings

Winner of the Alan Bray Memorial Book Prize presented by the GL/Q Caucus of the Modern Language AssociationFinalist for the 2015 LGBT Studies Award presented by the Lambda Literary FoundationSexual Futures, Queer Gestures and Other Latina Longings proposes a theory of sexual politics that works in the interstices between radical queer desires and the urgency of transforming public policy, between utopian longings and everyday failures. Considering the ways in which bodily movement is assigned cultural meaning, Juana María Rodríguez takes the stereotypes of the hyperbolically gestural queer Latina femme body as a starting point from which to discuss how gestures and forms of embodiment inform sexual pleasures and practices in the social realm.Centered on the sexuality of racialized queer female subjects, the book’s varied archive—which includes burlesque border crossings, daddy play, pornography, sodomy laws, and sovereignty claims—seeks to bring to the fore alternative sexual practices and machinations that exist outside the sightlines of mainstream cosmopolitan gay male culture. Situating articulations of sexual subjectivity between the interpretive poles of law and performance, Rodríguez argues that forms of agency continually mediate among these various structures of legibility—the rigid confines of the law and the imaginative possibilities of the performative. She reads the strategies of Puerto Rican activists working toward self-determination alongside sexual performances on stage, in commercial pornography, in multi-media installations, on the dance floor, and in the bedroom. Rodríguez examines not only how projections of racialized sex erupt onto various discursive mediums but also how the confluence of racial and gendered anxieties seeps into the gestures and utterances of sexual acts, kinship structures, and activist practices.Ultimately, Sexual Futures, Queer Gestures, and Other Latina Longings reveals —in lyrical style and explicit detail—how sex has been deployed in contemporary queer communities in order to radically reconceptualize sexual politics.

"The books intriguing methodological protocols, its vibrant archives, and its foregrounding of a Latina femme perspective make it a commanding contribution to performance studies, porn studies, women of color feminisms, Latinastudies, and queer of color critique. That is productively engages such a wide range of disciplines speaks to the success of its own amorous gesturing.", "Fun, sensual, and theoretically sophisticated, Sexual Futures, Queer Gestures, and Other Latina Longings questions facile binary oppositions by exploring the intricate and perverse world of fantasy and pleasure, particularly in contexts in which marginality, submission, and racialization seem to foreclose key moments of identification for queer subjects of color.", "With a distinctly lush style of inquiry, Sexual Futures, Queer Gestures, and Other Latina Longings mobilizes the stereotype of the hyperbolically gestural Latina femme with and for both pleasure and politics. Juana María Rodríguez is a fierce critic in all the best senses of that word.", "Through sensuous and seductive prose, Juana María Rodríguez demonstrates how queer gesture highlights the tension between socially inscribed corporeal regulation and agential enactments of subjectivity. Pivoting away from this binary through a reading of Latin@ excess, Sexual Futures, Queer Gestures, and Other Latina Longings demands that we radically reclaim abject sex as a site of queer futurity."

Juana María Rodríguez is Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of Queer Latinidad: Identity Practices, Discursive Spaces.