UCLA Center for the Study of Women

Without words Laura Aguilar’s photographs have broken a big silence across marginalized communities. The images that she produces represent a community that has been invisible in the arts, not only queer, brown, and female, but also large. The ability to claim identity is empowerment, and although Aguilar does not seek to define Chicana lesbian art, she does challenge viewers to reconceptualize constructs of race, class, gender, and sexuality, particularly patriarchal constructs of art that seek to romanticize or idealize the female form. Laura Aguilar’s photographs of female nude forms in the natural landscape represent a vision of the female body that directly shocks the viewer’s expectations and desires. It is through these aesthetic manipulations that Aguilar achieves self-acceptance of her own body, a body may not be considered “beautiful” or “fine art” because of how it opposes a Western aesthetic of “feminine beauty.”