LAUSR

Sexual Futures, Queer Gestures, and Other Latina Longings by Juana María Rodríguez is a critical addition to the canon of queer theory and, in particular, queer of color critique. Rodriguez is a professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Sexual Futures is her second book (her first was Queer Latinidad: Identity Practices, Discursive Spaces), and it adds significantly to work in Latinx sexualities, queer activism, visual culture, and performance studies. Likely to become required reading for graduate students of sexualities and queer studies, Sexual Futures is a love letter to Latinx femmes. Rodriguez’s evocative style invites the reader into a delicious romp—at times platonic, at others erotic. Whether it be running sweaty palms through dense theory or fingering through her objects of analysis that range from quotidian dance floor gestures to grand gestures of anti-colonial protest, Rodríguez delivers on her promise of a “critical engagement with sex in queer theory, in social justice activism, and in utopian longings for other sexual futures” (2014, p. 8, emphasis in original). It is her femme submissiveness that gives the reader permission to take hold of the text and dive in with her. Throughout the book, Rodríguez explores themes of gesture, sexual fantasy, abjection, and pleasure. Her use of gesture refers to the space “where the literal and figurative copulate” (2014, p. 4). Gesture refers not only to the literal movements of Latina femmes whose bodies are considered in excess, who ask for more than the liminal space they have been relegated to, but also to activist movements that ask for more than the status quo affords. She uses gesture as a metaphor for longing as well as a method for moving toward the utopian. For example, when one offers a hand to invite another to dance, this hand is a gesture signaling intention, longing, desire to the potential dance partner. Rodriguez imagines the book itself as a gesture: “It is an episode of language that reaches for the possibility that something else awaits us. This gesture is a kind of touching, a way of sensing what might flow between us” (2014, p. 1). In the field of queer theory, the point of reference is often a gay male subject; Rodriguez defiantly centers the Latina femme in her project of proposing a new theory of sexual politics. Gesture and fantasy serve as the foundation to her project, and as they point toward (and long for) a more livable future, they also proffer a critique of the present. In her submissiveness and her abject subjectivity—where her pleasure is rarely (if ever) acknowledged as possibility— the Latina femme demonstrates new ways to subvert power. Rodríguez’s objects of analysis begin with theoretical gestures toward livable futures, including kinship and domesticity practices, such as the ways that queers try not to assimilate to normative standards of familial life, that hold the state accountable while also demanding more than is currently being articulated by equal rights campaigns. She also analyzes Puerto Rican acts of anti-colonial dissent as means to push the bounds of the law. In the second half of the book, Rodríguez’s objects of analysis shift to more embodied forms of gesture, including how dance and sex practices offer possibilities of pleasure for subjectivities marked for death, such as queer communities and communities of color who do not receive the same priority from those in power as subjectivities like those who are White, heterosexual, and middle class. She concludes with an exploration of pornographic materials, such as the “I’m Your Puppet” theater show JOURNAL OF HOMOSEXUALITY 2018, VOL. 65, NO. 13, 1939–1940 https://doi.org/10.1080/00918369.2017.1386029