Week 6--Classmate Commentary: Lucero Duran (The Human Body: Isis Rodriguez and Laura Aguilar)

In her post this past week, Lucero drew connections between the work of Isis Rodriguez and Laura Aguilar. She notes the similarities of the two artists, commenting on gender inequality, sexism, and false standards of beauty and arguing that both artists draw attention to the truths behind these issues. I appreciate how Lucero draws connections between Isis’s work and Laura’s work. As noted in her post, both artists use the female body to make an individual statement about female empowerment. Using their personal experience with the body in relation to societal standards and enforcements of patriarchy, each artist has created work that draws on said personal experience to make art in a larger call for female empowerment.

This morning I was talking with my friend about exotic dancers. She and I got in an argument about if being a dancer can be empowering. She said that she could see how it would be empowering, in that it is a reclaiming over one’s sexuality. I claimed that while that might be valid, this reclaiming is occurring within patriarchal confines of our society; I claimed that these women, while maybe empowered through their sexuality, were still performing for men. I brought in Isis’s story, explaining that her experience in the dancing industry was largely disempowering. While at the end of the conversation my friend and I had not come to a mutual consensus I could not stop thinking about Isis’s experience. I appreciate that Lucero drew attention to the fact that Isis’s work is meant to both empower women and shed light on the truth of the industry.