Juana María Rodríguez

Juana María Rodríguez is a scholar of performance studies, queer theory, and Latina/o studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Her work examines how gesture, embodiment, and sexuality operate within and against structures of racialization and normativity — centering the bodily practices and erotic lives of queer Latina/o communities.

Core ideas

• Queer Latinidad: Rodríguez’s Queer Latinidad: Identity Practices, Discursive Spaces (2003) analyzed how queer Latina/o subjects navigate multiple axes of identity — citizenship, language, sexuality, race — through practices that exceed the frameworks available in mainstream queer politics or Latina/o cultural nationalism.
• Sexual futures and queer gestures: in Sexual Futures, Queer Gestures, and Other Latina Longings (2014), Rodríguez centered gesture — bodily movement, posture, erotic practice — as a site of political and theoretical significance, arguing that queer-of-color embodiment produces knowledge that exceeds what textual analysis alone can capture.

Notable works

• Queer Latinidad: Identity Practices, Discursive Spaces (2003)
• Sexual Futures, Queer Gestures, and Other Latina Longings (2014)

Related

• Queer-of-color critique — the tradition her work extends
• José Esteban Muñoz — fellow scholar of queer Latina/o cultural production
• Disidentification — a concept her work engages