Subversive Bodily Acts: The Photography of Laura Aguilar

Introduction

Astrid M. Fellner analyzes Laura Aguilar's photography, focusing on the subversion of traditional representations of the female body.
The essay explores how Aguilar, a lesbian Chicana artist, challenges the male gaze and rewrites the tradition of fine nude art.
Judith Butler's theories on the sexed body, gender performativity, and the relationship between language and materiality provide a framework for interpreting Aguilar's work.
The essay highlights the importance of self-representation for artists of color and queer artists in their struggle for political visibility.
Queerness is defined as a term that subverts group definition and is inherently political.

Performative Bodies

Butler argues that gender does not necessarily proceed from biological sex, challenging the assumption that gender is intricately related to the sexed body.
Butler's work deconstructs the gender/culture and sex/nature binaries.
The body is a product of both language and materiality.
Language both is and refers to that which is material, and what is material never fully escapes from the process by which it is signified.
The fixity of the body, its contours, its movements are material but this materiality must be rethought as the effect of power, as power's most productive effect.
Sex is a regulatory ideal materialized in the body through normatively governed practices.
Bodies are performative in the sense that they are constituted in the act of description.
One does not have a body or is a body, but one does one's body.
There is no reference to a pure body which is not at the same time a further formation of that body.
The body is a politically inscribed entity shaped by histories and practices of control and containment.
The body is always marked by differences, such as race, sex, gender, and class.
Normative heterosexuality is not the only regulatory regime operating in the production of the body.
The symbolic is also and always a racial industry, indeed, the reiterated practice of racializing interpellations.
Sexual and racial differences are not autonomous or separable axes of power.
Sex and gender are in no way prior to race but are conditions of articulation for each other.
The body serves as the margin joining/separating one subject from the other, one sex from the other, one race from the other.
The ostensibly stable identity of the body is a cultural fabrication whose regulation is controlled and policed through various discourses that normalize certain bodies and render others different and culturally abnormal.
Drawing on Julia Kristeva's notion of the abject and Iris Marion Young's analysis of the interconnections of racism, sexism and homophobia, Butler argues that the repudiation of bodies for their sex, sexuality, and/or color is an 'expulsion' followed by a 'repulsion' that founds and consolidates culturally hegemonic identities along sex/race/sexuality axes of differentiation.
Normative binaries through which bodies gain social meaning-male/female, heterosexual/homosexual, black/white, healthy/sick, thin/obese-may be exposed in their instability by the performativity of abject bodies.
The precariousness of all bodies is exposed by stressing the constitutive outside, from which they are alienated and on which they are also dependent.
The notion of performativity therefore suggests that the deployments of the body through acts and gestures, in terms of gendered sexuality and racialized identity are, through a practice of reiteration, productive of a discursive identity that is both open and constrained.
Aguilar draws attention to the bodily boundaries which are tenuously policed for the purpose of social regulation and control.
Through the parodic reiteration of gender Aguilar uses conventional definitions of femininity and female iconography in order to question them, destabilizing the idealizations of female beauty.

The Body Images of Laura Aguilar

Aguilar is a self-taught photographer from San Gabriel, CA, whose work has been exhibited at various galleries in the U.S. and the Venice Biennial in Italy.
Her black-and-white photographs focus on subjects whose images are under-represented in mainstream culture-people of color, gays, lesbians and obese people.
Using the camera to address the question of women's bodies, Aguilar challenges societal assumptions about beauty.
Aguilar's works offer an alternative to the commodified depictions of women generated by advertising and media.
Aguilar's artistic goal is to create photographic images that compassionately render the human experience, revealed through the lives of individuals in the lesbian/gay and/or persons of color communities.
Some of Aguilar's most impressive portraits and self-portraits are nudes.
The visual recreations of her own body represent body images that resist normalization, exposing the unnameable, abject domain.
Aguilar plays with her body image, crossing bodily borders by affirming the abject and challenging slenderness as the aesthetic body image ideal.

Sandy's Room (1989)

In her self-portrait, Sandy's Room (1989) we see a female nude comfortably reposing in an armchair in front of a fan.
This picture was displayed at the Berkeley exhibition In a Different Light under the category of \"Self.\"
The diverse art exhibits in the University Art Museum were grouped in a certain order, suggesting \"a kind of mathematical progression from zero (Void), one (Self), two (Couple), many (Family, World), to infinity (Utopia). This progression expresses an experience of moving toward ever greater degrees of sociability\"
Aguilar's portrait explores the self as a material entity before the formation of identity.
Placed next to Mapplethorpe's Self-Portrait with Whip, Sandy's Room is a queer image of powerfully self-contained sexuality, which, according to Blake, one of the curators of this exhibition, \"provokes anxiety on the part of the straight world\"
The image does not need an opposite; it does not need a viewer.
The notion of self-sufficiency is stressed by the sense of spaciousness conveyed by the open window in the background and the white margins of the walls which surround the subject.
This portrait is part of a series in which Aguilar photographed herself naked for the first time.
The artist admits that she could only overcome her fear of posing nude by reciting parts of a poem by Nikki Giovanni.
Giovanni's poem \"Mirrors\" reads:
The face in the window … is not the face in the mirror … Mirrors aren't for windows … they would block the light … Mirrors are for bedroom walls … or closet doors … Windows show who we hope to be … Mirrors reflect who we are … Mirrors . . . like religious fervors . . . are private . . . and actually uninteresting to those not involved . . . Windows open up … bring a fresh view … windows make us vulnerable.
This text captures many of the key aspects of Aguilar's esthetic project (looking at the self, questions of identity, the (blurred) boundary between the private and the public, the relationship between the subject and the viewer, the vulnerability of 'opening up'").
The open window which attracts the spectator's gaze, draws attention to the lack of engagement between model and spectators.
The window in this photograph does indeed bring a fresh view: it diverts the look of the camera into an open space outside libidinal economy, freeing the naked woman from the controlling gaze.
It hints at a desiring subjectivity, which exposes the tensions and difficulties of establishing a stable identity as an embodied subject.
Windows, as Giovanni's poem stresses, are metaphorically related to mirrors.
Jacques Lacan claims that as the young child develops the capacity to recognize her or his image in a mirror, the specular image the child sees is not a reflection but rather a fantasy construction, an ideal figure of bodily integration and unity with which the child identifies.
The mirror stage is not a developmental account of how the idea of one's own body comes into being. It does suggest, however, that the capacity to project a morphe, a shape, onto a surface is part of the psychic (and phantasmatic) elaboration, centering, and containment of one's own bodily contours.
This process of psychic projection or elaboration implies as well that the sense of one's own body is not (only) achieved through differentiating from another (the maternal body), but that any sense of bodily contour, as projected, is articulated through a necessary self-division and self-estrangement.
The mirror stage thus heralds a process of alienation.
While Lacan devotes much attention to the alienating character of the specular image, Butler, drawing on Kristeva, focuses on that which resists to be subsumed within that identity, on that which is other or abject.
According to Gail Weiss, for Kristeva, that which is 'lost' or which resists incorporation into the body image is also precisely what makes the coherent body image possible because it marks the boundary between the body image and what it is not.
In Gender Trouble Butler provides the following summary of Kristeva:
The "abject" designates that which has been expelled from the body, discharged as excrement, literally rendered "Other." This appears as an expulsion of alien elements, but the alien is effectively established through this expulsion. The construction of the "not-me" as the abject establishes the boundaries of the body which are also the first contours of the subject.
The constitution of a coherent body image is thus consolidated on the ground of abjection.
In traditional psychoanalytic and phenomenological conceptions of subjectivity, the notion of the body image is assumed to be a gender-neutral phenomenon, but Butler stresses the importance of the sexed/gendered and racialized body.
The constitution of the subject requires an identification with the normative phantasm of 'sex,' which involves moments of repudiation which in turn lead to an abject domain.
The materialization of a given sex will centrally concern the regulation of identificatory practices such that the identification with the abjection of sex will be persistently disavowed.
Abjection is a crucial component of the defensive fantasies which shape the body, but that which is excluded cannot be eliminated altogether.
There is a permanent danger that this bodily boundary between self and abject will be dissolved, and that the other side will overrun the borders.
The threat of eruption which causes instability of identity categories can be a critical resource in the struggle to rear-ticulate the very terms of symbolic legitimacy and intelligibility and it is through practices which underscore disidentification with the regulatory norms by which sexual difference is materialized that both feminist and queer politics are mobilized.
The female body in Aguilar's self-portraits continually threatens to overrun its borders, showing how the fragility of the border in turn undermines the stability and coherence of the Chicana body image.
In the Mexican/Chicano context, the cultural meaning assigned to the female body is related to two cultural figures, La Virgen de Guadalupe and La Malinche, who have cast the Chicana into the binary categories of woman as either Goddess/virgin or traitor/whore.
La Malinche is the Indian woman who helped Heman Cortez subjugate the Aztec people when he arrived in Mexico.
In most traditional representations, La Malinche is seen as an object of sexual desire, and since she was taken by force, she is la chingada, the violated one, who had the violator's child, thus betraying her culture and her race.
The Chicana female body is thus rendered as abject and treacherous.
Identifying woman's body as the site of cultural betrayal, the myth of La Malinche signifies a specific kind of body: the repressed, submissive, heterosexual body.
Any deviation from this cultural expectation constitutes a menace, threatening to contaminate the body politic, to destroy the very fabric of cultural identity and nationalism.

Three Eagles Flying (1990)

In her photographs Aguilar interrogates these cultural nationalist discourses of identity and community.
Breaking with the dominant system of representation, Aguilar confronts us with body images that contest the ideal body of Chicana identity.
In her picture Three Eagles Flying (1990), for instance, Aguilar's body is positioned between two flags that symbolize her bicultural identity.
The placement of the subject between the two flags stresses the experience of living on the border.
The placement of the subject between the two flags suggests no home in either, while the rope around her neck and hands and the equally binding flags around her body convey the punitive and psychic aspects of failing to 'fit in'.
The bottom half of her body is covered by the American flag and her head is hidden by the Mexican flag.
Her body is tied with a rope as in a hostage situation.
The picture's title clearly is ironic.
The word eagle refers both to the \"aguila\" of Mexican identity and the eagle of U.S. imperialism, and is a pun on the surname Aguilar.
\"Aguilar means eagle in Spanish,\" Hulick writes, \"so the title and photograph combine to form an ironic reference to eagles which are bound or hang, but certainly do not fly. Aguilar feels constrained and surrounded by these two cultures\".
Since a good part of the body is hidden, Aguilar's skin color cannot be made out easily.
Referencing both the ideal mestizo body of Mexican and Chicano nationalism and the white U.S. American body, Aguilar's body in this picture thus defies easy racial categorizations.
The large size of the subject's body interrupts the binary U.S./Mexico "to create the focal point of the composition as something more than either pole (I am the product of this conflict, but more than this)".
Interestingly, her breasts are exposed, "as if suggesting the impossibility of completely imprisoning her body through monolithic definitions of race/ethnicity or nation".
The representation of the female body as constrained by rigid constructs of identity also points to the notion that, historically, women have been determined by their bodies.
While the male subject has become disembodied, achieving selfhood disjoined from the body and linked with the soul, the female subject inheres in her embodiment.
By defining women as 'Other,' men are able through the shortcut of definition to dispose of their bodies, to make themselves other than their bodies [ … ] and to make their bodies other than themselves. From this belief that the body is Other, it is not a far leap to the conclusion that others are their bodies, while the masculine 'I' is the noncorporeal soul. The body rendered as Other-the body repressed or denied and, then, projected-re-emerges for this 'I' as the view of others as essentially body. Hence, women become the Other; they come to embody corporeality itself.
Women and racially and/or ethnically marginalized people thus find themselves culturally embodied.
Those people who are assigned non-hegemonic identities are often reduced to essential bodies, constituting an invitation to the gaze.
Aguilar's body attracts the gaze, yet also resists it, as signified by the naked breasts between the flags, which defy cultural and political definitions.

Performative Subversions

Abjection is a process by which the norms of embodied identity are disrupted.
The ongoing attempt to establish bodily borders, once and for all, functions to demarcate those who "count" as subjects from those who do not, from those whose bodies do not matter.
This exclusionary matrix by which subjects are formed thus requires the simultaneous production of a domain of abject beings, those who are not yet "subjects," but who form the constitutive outside to the domain of the subject. The abject designates here precisely those "unlivable" and "uninhabitable" zones of social life which are nevertheless densely populated by those who do not enjoy the status of the subject, but whose lives under the sign of the "unlivable" is required to circumscribe the domain of the subject.
Obese bodies are considered aberrant body images, body images that refuse normalization in a Foucauldian sense, bodies that refuse to cohere, because they are at odds with societal attitudes, individual and social expectations.
By abjecting the 'fat' body from the culturally constructed aesthetic domain, people and not just body parts are designated as the abject other, doomed to exist in those uninhabitable, unlivable regions that Butler reminds us are, in fact, densely populated.
These regions are not just inhabited by overweight people, but also by those whose skin color is different from the norm.
These regions are currently in danger of being overpopulated insofar as none of us can forever live up to what Audre Lorde calls the 'mythical norm'.
According to Lorde, this mythical norm consists of those who are "white, thin, male, young, heterosexual, Christian, and financially secure".
This norm serves to define a cultural body image ideal, which is sought after by many women.
Aguilar confronts this \"mythical norm\" by focusing on nude images which accentuate the voluminous folds of her own body.
Using the body as a means of self-expression, Aguilar reclaims the body from cultural appropriation, transforming it into a site of empowerment.
For the self-portrait series Stillness (1999), produced during her two-month stay in San Antonio, Aguilar explores the representational landscape of her body, focusing on the seductive potential and beauty particular to classic black and white photography.

Stillness #27

The photographs show the artist, posing nude with other female figures in nature.
These photographs are beautifully disquieting. They participate in a kind of subdued grotesque drawn from and encouraging of an aesthetics of reverence. Reverence for the mysteries of nature, reverence for the mysteries of the self, reverence for the contemplative communion found in the sublime unification of both. The artist is conscious of the unconventional contours that constitute the parameters of her physical body.
The images challenge people's reactions to weight or size, calling into question the ways we see density, proportion, and beauty.
Aguilar's deployment of the female nude aligns with more consciously critical considerations of the representation of women, as undertaken, for instance, by Paula Modersohn-Becker or Suzanne Valadao. Aguilar's photographs are, however, also an overt reference to the images of the Mexican painter Botero, whose standing or reclining female nudes focus on the voluptuousness and intimations of carnal pleasure.
Aguilar challenges this dominant pictorial tradition of nude art, which has delineated the female body as an object of sexual access for male viewers and consumers.
Placing herself within nature and averting her gaze from the viewer, Aguilar employs her system of representation outside of objectifying pictures of women.
The male gaze of the implicit spectator, sometimes described as the eye's erection, is neither challenged by the defiant (female) "counter-gaze," which would merely acknowledge the "omnipotent power" of the gaze by way of imitation, nor solicited in excess so as to accentuate the constructed nature of gender and race. What we witness in Aguilar's photographs, then, is a shift of focus from the aesthetics of prescriptive identity politics, which tend to act upon differences of all types, toward the production of radical inter-subjectivity.
The picture Stillness #27 features a woman back-bending supine on the artist's back.
The two naked bodies are contrasted with the rough terrain of the desert landscape and are depicted as absorbed in their own activities.
By removing her iconography from an assumption of female sexual performance for men, this picture colludes with narratives that construct female identity through connections with nature.
Naked, and surrounded by nature, Aguilar obviously enjoys being with women.

Center Series (2001)

In her Center series (2001 ), the artist is crouched on the ground and becomes integrated into the landscape.
Her body appears soft and timeless, her posture resembling a yoga exercise.
Further abstracted by the silver print, she is smooth, hard and timeless until she rolls to her side, revealing a very soft and human torso as well as a rare glimpse of the artist's face. The effect is that of a seed or a cocoon bursting open.
The fetal position of her body suggests a certain vulnerability, alluding to the precarious moment before the constitution of the subject, in which the sense of one's own body is achieved through a differentiating from the maternal body.
But is she beautiful? And to what extent does that matter? These are questions that Aguilar's work asks her viewers to confront.
The experience of abjection is evoked by phenomena which inspire disgust or horror because of the threat which liminality poses to the attempt to stabilize categories.
The power of abjection, however, lies in the fact that what people find repulsive is also that which attracts them most strongly.
Devotees of the abject [ … ] do not cease looking [ … ] for the desirable and terrifying, nourishing and murderous, fascinating and abject inside of the maternal body.
Aguilar's self-portraits represent the experience of abjection, which the viewer normally excludes from her or his awareness.
The combination of beauty and repulsion that these images offer enables the viewer to take pleasure in the photographed body.
The non-distinctiveness of inside and outside is unnamable, a border passable in both directions by pleasure and pain. Naming the latter, hence differentiating them, amounts to introducing language, which just as it distinguishes pleasure from pain, as it does all other oppositions, founds the separation inside/outside. And yet, there would be witnesses to the perviousness of the limit, artisans after a fashion who try to tap that pre-verbal beginning within a word which is flush with pleasure and pain.
Aguilar can be understood as such a witness of the fragile boundaries.
Her nude portraits draw attention to the moment of abjection which haunts the subject.
Revealing the contingency and instability of the body image, Aguilar transforms the pictorial image of the abject into an empowered body which takes on a carnivalesque beauty.
The fascination of her photographs thus lies in the tension between the pain and horror of what they represent, and the luscious visual pleasure which they offer to the viewer.