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Friendship, Sex Work, and Transnational Motherhood: A Feminist Analysis of Beatriz Flores Silva's En la Puta Vida (Tricky Life)

Abstract:This article analyzes Beatriz Flores Silva's En la Puta Vida (2001), one of the most acclaimed Uruguayan films in recent history. While previous critics have viewed this film as a cultural text that only responds to the interests of big global media capital and that reinscribes notions of the heteronormative family, I argue that Flores Silva's film is both a globalized product and a politicized narrative that strategically uses the genre of melodrama to articulate a feminist politics, underscoring the ways in which the economies of transnational motherhood, sex work, and human trafficking mark particular female bodies. Sex work, I suggest, enables the protagonist to engage in the construction of a friendship-based endeavor (communal ownership of a beauty parlor) that itself hints at the work of the self, on the self, and the aesthetic as a mode of alternative sociality. I propose that regardless of obvious reinscriptions, this film presents us with a narrative that asserts sex work as a legitimate form of labor and foregrounds female friendship as a political ideality. En la Puta Vida, I contend, pushes the audience to question and grapple with what constitutes work, the moral, and the "good life."