Academic Papers

Spring 2026

Peter Paul Rubens and Fatness: Aesthetic, Fetish, and Language

Abstract: This paper interrogates how the term “Rubenesque” (named after the women depicted in Peter Paul Rubens oil paintings) has affected art historians ability to accurately describe fat bodies in contemporary portraiture by observing how the term is misused and offering a linguistic way to move foreword. 

Fall 2025

Distributed Intensities as Countervisuals in Laura Aguilar’s Nature Self Portrait Series

Abstract: In an attempt to blend my experience as an art history student and a women, gender, and sexuality studies student, during the fall semester of 2025, I researched the photography series Nature Self-Portraits by Laura Aguilar under the theoretical lens of Monica Figueroa’s distributed intensities of oppression from her paper “Distributed Intensities: Whiteness, Mestizaje and the Logics of Mexican Racism.” In doing so, I asserted that the art historian and critic’s response to Aguilar’s series , and specifically the depiction of her nude, fat body, was intensified because of the art historical context surrounding nude female photography as a subject. Within my paper, I compare Aguilar’s Nature Self-Portrait #13 (1996) to Judy Dater’s Self Portrait with Stone (1981) that Aguilar would have known as an apprentice of Dater, and how the relationship between the photographs exemplify Figueroa’s framework.

Fall 2024

Body, Love, and Loss: Analyzing Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s Works About Ross Laycock through the Lens of Disability

Abstract: This paper analyzes works by AIDS artist, Felix Gonzales-Torres, about his partner, Ross Laycock, specifically Perfect Lovers (1981-90) and Portrait of Ross in L.A. (1991), through the lens of disability. Gonzalez-Torres’s work often heavily deals with body without even depicting one, and with the disabling aspect of the progression of HIV/AIDS, much of his work can be categorized as disability art even if they were not intended to be labeled as such.