UC Berkeley

© 2016 Women & Performance Project Inc. Using the auto/biography, Vanessa del Rio: Fifty Years of Slightly Slutty Behavior as the primary text, this paper investigates how an embodied understanding of race and class alters our understanding of gendered experiences of violence and pleasure. It asks: what happens when the life experiences of an aging Afro-Latina porn star are positioned at the very heart of feminist investigations into the relationship between sexual experience and knowledge production? In the process, this paper reflects on how images and text function as complicated triggers for the attachments, identifications, desires, and traumas of our own corporeal embodiments and sexual histories.