Spilling Herself in Trees: Autoarte and Laura Aguilar's Queer Erotics

Chapter 3 fleshes out an account of carnal aesthetics by introducing the Anzaldúa-inspired notion of autoarte as one of its key practices. This chapter engages Anzaldúa's notion of border arte and describes its main elements. Ultimately, for Anzaldúa border arte is a politically resistant creation arising in the limen. Autoarte is introduced as a key carnality involving a deeply intimate, personal, subjective creative process in which a self becomes perceptually and thus affectively attuned to elements, environments, material and spiritual worlds, in order to name herself. The chapter then centers the creative photographic practice of Laura Aguilar as an instance of autoarte. It traces the intimate movement of affective mapping in Aguilar's photography so as to show it as an erotics of light. The discussion in this section is inspired by the technologies of Chela Sandoval's “methodology of the oppressed,” the notion of differential consciousness, and her account of love.