Date of Award
Spring 5-31-2025
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Fine Arts (MFA)
Department
Photography
First Advisor
Eduardo L Rivera
Second Advisor
Rana Young
Third Advisor
Joshua Citarella
Abstract
“Jotographía // Fagtography: On Amor Propio Radical // Radical Self-Love” is an interdisciplinary thesis that explores the intersections of queer Chicanx identity, photography, and performance as technologies of survival and self-construction. I construct a speculative archive of Chicanx queer experience through my tripartite personas: Barbí, Luke, and myself—collectively, the Guzman Triplets.
Through these embodied avatars, I embrace rasquachismo, camp, Catholic iconography, and hybrid photographic processes—including Polaroids, AI-manipulated imagery, anthotypes, and installation—to investigate visibility, fragmentation, and ancestral memory. Rooted in Gloria Anzaldúa’s frameworks of la herida abierta and nepantla, José Esteban Muñoz’s concepts of disidentification and queer futurity, and bell hooks’ theory of radical self-love, my work resists coherence and instead honors multiplicity as a generative force. I treat performance and fiction not as escape but as radical strategies for conjuring queer utopian futures grounded in memory, grief, glamour, and love.
In Jotographía, I reclaim visual culture as a sacred language of resistance. I propose a visual and theoretical cosmology in which abjection becomes holy, spectacle becomes a survival strategy, and radical self-love becomes a method of world-building for those of us living in the liminal borderlands of race, gender, and desire.
Recommended Citation
Guzman, Jonathan Erick, "Jotographía // Fagtography: On Amor Propio Radical // Radical Self-Love" (2025). Masters Theses. 1491.
https://digitalcommons.risd.edu/masterstheses/1491
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
Included in
Art Practice Commons, Chicana/o Studies Commons, Ethnic Studies Commons, Fine Arts Commons, Interdisciplinary Arts and Media Commons, Latina/o Studies Commons, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Studies Commons, Photography Commons, Queer Studies Commons