[1] She has two siblings: her sister Dinorah de Jesús Rodríguez,an experimental filmmaker and visual artist who works between Havana and Miami, and her brother René.

[5] The author of three monographs, Puta Life: Seeing Latinas, Working Sex (Duke UP, 2023); Sexual Futures, Queer Gestures, and Other Latina Longings (NYU 2014) and Queer Latinidad: Identity Practices, Discursive Spaces (NYU Press, 2003), Rodríguez has also published essays in GLQ: a Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies; Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory; Radical History Review; PMLA; MELUS; Profession and others.

Rodríguez's first book, Queer Latinidad: Identity Practices, Discursive Spaces (NYU Press, 2003) introduced the idea of queer latinidad as a way to disarticulate the ways that history, geography, colonialism, ethnicity, nationality, language, religion, legal status, immigration status, class, color, and the politics of location exist to complicate facile notions of Latino identity.

[1] In that book, Rodríguez identifies three case studies that involve different understandings of ethnic and sexual identity: activism through the queer Latino/a HIV prevention agency Proyecto ContraSIDA por Vida; law through the asylum case of Marcelo Tenorio, a gay Afro-Brazilian who was granted political asylum in the United States based on sexual persecution; and cyberspace by examining the internet chatrooms of the IRC (Internet Relay Chat) an early form of digital connectivity.

[7] Throughout the book, she uses the idea of gesture to emphasize non-verbal ways of communicating gendered and ethnic identity, and as a metaphor to think about activist practices that are partial, in-process and incomplete.

A frequent public speaker and writer, Rodríguez has also published articles on the Orlando nightclub shooting,[14] diversity in Higher Education,[15] gay marriage, and bisexuality.