The Object Selving of Laura Aguilar: Queer Chicana Opacity and the Archive Prosthetic

Abstract:The work of Laura Aguilar, a photographer and lifelong Angeleno, often foregrounds her intersecting queer, Chicana, fat, and dyslexic identities. This reading addresses Aguilar's claim to power in object-hood, actualizing a selfhood beyond the limits of subjectivity or negation by staging opacity in her photographs. Aguilar engages in what Uri McMillan calls "prosthetic performance": co-significations by an animate body and an inanimate but catalytic thing, or actuant. Layering objects upon objects, Aguilar's prosthetic performances refract normative, dominant gazes that would overdetermine the bounds of her selfhood according to the markings her body bears. She plainly addresses the trauma of misrecognition as a queer Chicana, but her performances are neither defined by her pain nor reducible to gestures of refusal. The opacity of Aguilar's flesh subverts photographic truth effects, making the archive another actuant in her performance of self-becoming and potentiality. This paper sutures critical discourses surrounding Aguilar, braiding foundational analyses of her oeuvre at their intersections with Black and Chicana feminisms, performance studies, and new materialist theorizations of the object.