Co-composing with Laura Aguilar’s “Nature Self-Portrait” Series: A Case for a Neurodivergent Gaze

Abstract

This article develops a theory of neurodivergent gaze via a mode of environmental awareness by engaging with Laura Aguilar’s Nature Self-Portrait photographic series (1996). I do so through my positionality as a neurodivergent spectator and autotheoretically argue that a neurodivergent gaze manifests affectively and texturally as I develop an overclose proximity with Aguilar’s self-portraits. I draw on Ann Cvetkovich, Lauren Berlant, and Erin Manning to first situate Aguilar’s photographs as neurodivergently-coded by taking into account her state of depression, dissociation, and suicidiation at the time when the photographs were taken. Through Matthew J.C. Cella and Alan Jurgens, I claim that depression can be understood via ecosomatic and enactive paradigms that consider an individual’s affective, somatic, and cognitive constitution as deeply entangled with one’s surroundings. I argue that these self-portraits are a cripistemology of depression that Aguilar then mobilizes to dismantle the anthropocentric, able-bodyminded, and neurotypically-inflected subject-object, human-nonhuman division by highlighting how the New Mexico landscape and her body constantly appear to co-compose each other. I define this movement of co-compositionality as the environmental awareness of a neurodivergent gaze in operation. This, as Manning argues, attends to both human and nonhuman elements nonhierarchically and indiscriminately, therefore dismantling the vertical hierarchy between the two in anthropocene spectatorship of the genre of self-portraiture. Lastly, as I theoretically enflesh my neurodivergent gaze’s operation via Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Tina Campt, I, too, co-compose a self-portrait in a spectatorial response to Aguilar’s photographs.