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 Association Finalist for the 2015 LGBT Studies Award presented by the Lambda Literary Foundation Sexual 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 Mara Rodrguez 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 books varied archivewhich includes burlesque border crossings, daddy play, pornography, sodomy laws, and sovereignty claimsseeks 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, Rodrguez argues that forms of agency continually mediate among these various structures of legibilitythe 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. Rodrguez 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 detailhow sex has been deployed in contemporary queer communities in order to radically reconceptualize sexual politics.