Response to post by Lucero Duran: The Human Body: Isis Rodriguez and Laura Aguilar

                I love that you reflected on both Isis and Laura’s use of the female body in making punctuated statements about femininity, female empowerment, and societal perception. Isis’s artwork is informed by her past as a sex-worker; Aguilar’s ongoing experience as a socially unacceptable beauty informs hers.  

                It is as if both women were pushed by society into two opposite corners of how it tends to categorize women’s looks: object of desire and object of repulsion—sexy or ugly. Yet neither woman succumbed to the gesture of sexual categorization. As you mentioned, seeing the corrosive force of sexualization, Isis made it a point to dispel myths about the power of sex by essentially illustrating the sex industry’s fallout which is often derided as simply minutiae or worse—unimportant as long as the workers feel good. She illustrates the ephemeral nature of using the body for money. Her work makes it a point to move girls’ self-perception and worth, in a sense, closer to Laura Aguilar’s position.

                Laura, on the other end of the spectrum, found that society had expectations of her: she should be unhappy with her body because it is not what society deems beautiful. However, Laura took her image into her own palm and found ways to make herself beautiful and alluring to viewers, if only for moments at a time. In a way the state of feeling that Laura can achieve through her self-portraits in the desert moves her closer to the feeling that sex workers might feel while under the spell of the job.

                It was interesting reading your connections between the two artists despite the radical differences in both the work and the women. Thank you.