The Plush View: Makeshift Sexualities and Laura Aguilar’s Forbidden Archives - Notes

The Plush View: Makeshift Sexualities and Laura Aguilar’s Forbidden Archives

Introduction

Macarena Gómez-Barris analyzes Laura Aguilar's black-and-white portraits from the 1980s and 1990s, specifically the Latina Lesbians series (1985–91) and the Plush Pony series (1992). These series document Latina queer life in Los Angeles.
The Latina Lesbians series included handwritten text by the photographed subject below the image.
The Plush Pony series was photographed at a lesbian bar in El Sereno, Los Angeles.
These series provide archival insights into the social connectivity and complexity of Latina, Chicana, immigrant, and queer Los Angeles during the Reagan era and the AIDS crisis.
Aguilar's work documents queer brown networks, centering female subjects with pleasure, pride, and friendship.
Aguilar's focus on the provisionality of queer connectivity feels prescient, especially considering the ossification of LGBT identities in late commodity capitalism and the re-entrenchment of liberal identity politics.
Aguilar offers an intimate and queer view of affiliations, challenging normative institutions and historical memory.
Aguilar's photographs present a network of connections between friends, lovers, and strangers, radiating a "plush view" of Latina queer sociality.
The "plush view" references the relational matrix of the Plush Pony bar and portrays lo prohibido (forbidden sexualities), attending to queer possibilities within Latina, Chicana, and immigrant communities.
The "plush view" highlights how to read lo cuir in Chicana urban cultural production, noting the difficulty of collecting its material culture.
A "plush view" describes the affective density of Aguilar’s images, approximating the provisional networks of sexualities, archives, and imaginaries at play in Axis Mundo.
Aguilar’s social documentation and C. Ondine Chavoya and David Evans Frantz’s curatorial project assemble communities of cultural production that arose during politically charged decades.

Makeshifting within the Colonial Matrix

Laura Aguilar was born in the San Gabriel Valley in 1959 and describes herself as a largely self-taught photographer.
Aguilar negated her early Catholic training that upheld patriarchal norms.
She repositioned dominant representations of gender, the body, sexuality, race, and class.
Growing up in Chicanx and immigrant worlds in Los Angeles gave Aguilar a multiply situated viewpoint on Latina identity.
Her lesbian positionality offered creative intervention opportunities into the cultural and political landscape.
Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Aguilar worked collaboratively with feminist and lesbian organizations in Los Angeles, including VIVA and GLLU.
VIVA was a coalition of queer Latinx artists involved with raising AIDS awareness.
GLLU (Gays and Lesbians Latinos Unidos) was an advocacy group for the LGBT Latinx community.
Aguilar traveled to Mexico City in the early 1990s as part of a transnational alliance that participated in feminist dialogues and collaborative exhibitions.
Her experiences enriched a sense of being within and working alongside the growing networks of LGBT communities, intimacies, and political dialogues.
In 2015, Aguilar discussed the autobiographical dimension of her practice, considering her second-generation status and lesbian identification as central to her photographic vision.
She suggested that her auditory dyslexia opened the door to photography, a visual medium that became her preferred method of communication.
Aguilar understands her marginality, but not as radical otherness, demarcating a space for self-representation that has been essential to her method throughout her career.
In Sandy’s Room (1989) is a self-portrait where Aguilar inserts her queer body and subjectivity into the focal point of the frame, interrupting normalized heterosexual viewing of female bodies and capitalist exchanges.
Artists such as Aguilar activate the capacity to disidentify from monetized systems of representation, making visible another way of seeing brown queer lives.
Will Work for #4 (1993) confronts the colonial and modern systems of representation and speaks directly to a system of institutionalized racism, homophobia, and misogyny.

The Plush View

Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano discusses Aguilar’s nude portraiture as a model for queer embodiment within a racialized and gendered normatively sorted world.
Asta Kuusinen states that Aguilar’s photographs shift the focus from the aesthetics of prescriptive identity politics toward the production of radical intersubjectivity.
Aguilar's plush view is about queer looking and queer being, based upon radical intersubjectivity rather than networks of commodified exchange.
The Latina Lesbians and Plush Pony series differ from hegemonic representations of women of color by tracking away from binaries of private/public, subject/viewer, and individual auteur/community.
Aguilar breaks down the inside/outside of the queer communities and Latina subjects she documents.

The Archive and Plush Viewing

Catriona Rueda Esquibel queers the Chicana archive by considering a body of specifically lesbian work with its own genealogies.
José Esteban Muñoz expresses the possibility of utopic potential, namely that queerness, and brown queerness in particular, is “not yet here.”
Laura Aguilar’s portraits both queer and brown the archive by portraying sensibilities and affective communities through particular forms of queer embodiment.
An image of a Chicana butch enveloping a Chicana queer femme in the Plush Pony series exudes joy, with the subjects appearing to be a couple.
Such resignification of pachuca/o styles signifies gender and sexual non-conformity while queering romantic expectation, captured by Aguilar’s plush view.
The plush view of non-commodified and intimate circuits of exchange is examined through localized geographies and intimate spaces, documenting the non-normativity of a queer duo.
Aguilar made several visits to the Plush Pony, the lesbian bar in the El Sereno neighborhood in Los Angeles, to inhabit such intimate views.
The bar dates back to the late 1960s and was likely eviscerated by gentrification during the first decade of the 2000s.
Aguilar organized a space for herself to record a community in the making, using her camera as a way to approach people.
Photography was not merely about shooting pictures of marginalized subjects but provided Aguilar with a mediated instrument of sociality to make relational connections visible.
Aguilar worked in a makeshift setup at the back of the bar, offering her subjects a free five-by-eight-inch print of their finished portrait in exchange for their participation.
The entire enterprise of the series was put into flux by the provisional conditions of the ad-hoc studio, the small space, and the nature of shooting portraits in a bar late at night.
Aguilar’s photographs from the Plush Pony present a vibrant and heterogeneous set of encounters and subjects that cannot be fixed into particular categories.
The photos collectively make visible a working-class and queer relationality with a makeshift sensibility.
Despite hostile political conditions and the Plush Pony’s eventual disappearance, Aguilar’s photography makes visible important moments of pleasure, community, and friendship.
Aguilar shows the contingency of queer relations and transitional immigrant nightlife.
Social documentary photography tends to capture its subjects to draw attention to social issues, but the brown queer archive has a different condition of possibility because of displacement, dislocation, movement across borders, fragmentation, and its “uncollected” quality.
The makeshift studio is replicated at the level of institutional collection and circulation of Aguilar’s work, facing material, racial, and gendered inequality in art world circulation.

Latina Lesbians

The Latina Lesbians series focuses on working- and middle-class Latinas from the United States, Puerto Rico, and multiple Latin American nations.
Aguilar locates a density of connection through place-making, a sense of the other, and a perceptual logic that expresses social connections.
Aguilar foregrounds those Latina lesbian immigrants and Chicanas that she knew or came to know, expanding her participation within LGBT organizations like VIVA and GLLU.
Aguilar photographed her subjects in the clothes and settings in which they felt most comfortable.
She used the camera to create social intimacy and asked her subjects to provide handwritten statements describing their personal histories and aspirations.
A photograph of Carla shows her in a black leather jacket, with the caption suggesting her fierce and unstoppable character.
In another image, Joy is dressed in jeans, a rolled-up jacket, and a white T-shirt with a triangle, with her narrative caption.
Noteworthy is that Joy transitioned from identification as female to male, leading Aguilar to suggest that she no longer exhibits that portrait because she does not feel comfortable retrospectively representing "women" and "Lesbians" for those subjects whose gender identities have shifted.
Aguilar’s plush view allows for a fixity of self-definitions, making it difficult to reframe or differently narrate "for others" their self-representation.
The series is a moving archive that constantly reorganizes categories like genderqueer, butch, and trans, proliferating the homogeneity of a category like “Latina Lesbian”.
Both the Plush Pony and Latina Lesbians series acutely express Aguilar’s documentary project and approach to community engagement as a spatially organized visual practice.
Aguilar cooperates with her subjects so that her work is not about power differentials between photographer and subject.
This “bringing to light” is also about expressing through a decolonial queer eye, allowing for the heterogeneity of social life otherwise.
Aguilar’s body of work can be read as an important expression and extension of Chicana and Latina feminisms.
In Aguilar’s Three Eagles Flying (1990), the decolonial eye is how Aguilar manages to interpolate her own sources of identifications, even as she proliferates visual language.
Aguilar’s photographs are an extension of Chicana feminist and queer writers such as Gloria Anzaldúa, Cherrie Moraga, and Emma Pérez, raising the issues of identity, community, and sexuality.
Aguilar's work also sits alongside that of Chicana feminist artists, such as Yreina D. Cervantez, Alma López, and Laura Molina.
Aguilar’s photographs must be read within the context of Chicana feminist cultural production and the queer communities recorded, offering the intimate view of belonging within queer brown socialities.

Archival Unbonding

Laura Aguilar’s portraiture allows me to ponder the unbinding of normative scripts that construct the brown queer archive and its ability to puncture the very temporality of the present.
Harry Gamboa Jr.’s portrait work in the series Chicano Male Unbonded (1991–ongoing) delivers an important parallel view to Aguilar’s practice.
Gamboa’s renderings of Chicano masculinity reverse stereotypical portrayals, documenting life otherwise.
Through Gamboa’s photography and Aguilar’s photographic practices, we can approximate the meaning of documenting life otherwise.
Matt Richardson describes a permanent affect of mourning for those who have passed and those never recognized, functioning differently for histories of black and brown people.
Stacy Macias’s work on queer Chicana Los Angeles develops a specific reading practice that apprehends the forbidden subjects of these archives.
José Esteban Muñoz described the specific structure of the depressive position of the Latina that we may be encountering in Aguilar’s work.
The series point to webs of erotic and friendship communities that pop into life, arguing from the position of a brown, female, queer presence.

Toward a Conclusion

Queer brown networks are not easy to uncover but exude a particular archival force.
The potential of forbidden archives became apparent during research at the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center in 2014.
In the Roberto Legoretta-Cyclona Collection, a collaged scrapbook page included an image of Robert Legorreta as Cyclona, collaged against articles about early Brown Beret social movements and student walkouts.
This archive is one of forbidden subjects, subjects that do not “capitulate to the terms of racialized propriety or queer intelligibility”.
The elisions, invisibilities, and incompleteness of the Chicanx and Latinx archive can be read from Aguilar’s work.
Through her lens, we understand the representational histories of brownness and the exclusions of brown people from queer histories.
Through Aguilar’s eye, we also become privy to a plush view that illuminates brown queer life in all its pleasures, connections, and provisional possibilities, anchoring a present-future imagination of worlds otherwise.