2022 Annual Kessler Lecture & Award: Honoring Dr. Juana María Rodríguez

Join CLAGS, the Center for LGBTQ Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center, in honoring Dr. Juana María Rodríguez, our 31st annual Kessler Award recipient. The David R. Kessler Award is given every year to a scholar and/ or activist who has produced a substantive body of work that has had a significant influence on the field of LGBTQ Studies.

Testimonial speakers:

• Emma Perez
• Judith Butler
• Xandra Ibarra

2022 Kessler Award Winner

Dr. Juana María Rodriquez is Professor of Ethnic Studies, Gender and Women’s Studies, and Performance Studies at UC Berkeley. A graduate of the Ethnic Studies Ph.D. at Berkeley, her research focuses on racialized sexuality and gender; affect and aesthetics; queer of color theory and activism; technology and media arts; law and critical race theory; and Latinx and Caribbean literatures and cultures. Professor Rodríguez is the author of Queer Latinidad: Identity Practices, Discursive Spaces (NYU Press, 2003); Sexual Futures, Queer Gestures, and Other Latina Longings (NYU Press 2014) which won the Alan Bray Memorial Book Prize at the Modern Language Association and was a Lambda Literary Foundation Finalist for LGBT Studies, and served as a co-editor of the special issue of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly on “Trans Studies en las Americas.” In 2021 she was the John P. Birkelund Fellow in the Humanities at the American Academy in Berlin where she completed her third monograph, Puta Life: Seeing Latinas, Working Sex, now in production at Duke University Press.