The digital world, Russell points out, is not separate from “real life.” It is one and the same, exhibiting the same white supremacist violence, the same heteronormative, patriarchal aesthetic standards, the same erasure of marginalized bodies and voices. It took Aguilar decades to get recognition for her work, which is still undervalued, arguably because of subtle and entrenched racism, homophobia, fatphobia and misogyny-biases that existed long before social media.Ĭlarity Haynes’s Davi, 2019. This kind of censorship does not exist in a digital vacuum. After the 11th time I posted the work, my own account was threatened with removal. Instagram’s policies, however, make an exception for nudity in painting and sculpture, in essence declaring that photography is not a true fine art form. There was nothing graphic or even overtly sexual here there was simply Aguilar’s beautiful, fat, Latina lesbian body in a desert landscape. It also includes some photos of female nipples, but photos in the context of breastfeeding, birth giving and after-birth moments, health-related situations (for example, post-mastectomy, breast cancer awareness or gender confirmation surgery) or an act of protest are allowed.” The women’s genitals are not clearly visible in Aguilar’s photograph and their nipples meld with the landscape. This includes photos, videos, and some digitally-created content that show sexual intercourse, genitals, and close-ups of fully-nude buttocks. The image only marginally violates Instagram’s “Community Guidelines,” which state “or a variety of reasons, we don’t allow nudity on Instagram. The post was taken down, so I reposted it. The image shows Aguilar and another woman nude, from a distance, in a desert landscape as Aguilar lifts the other person up in the air. If all of that sounds vague, let me give you a concrete example: Recently, I posted on Instagram a photograph by the artist Laura Aguilar, who died in 2018, to mark the appearance of her long-overdue traveling retrospective at the Leslie-Lohman Museum in New York. One of the author’s deleted Instagram posts. They have breasts that sag, nipples that tell stories, asymmetrical parts, arms that are wrinkled, scars from surgeries and body modification, synthetic hormones that make it all unreadable to the gender binary-entrenched system. They are queer, trans, old, fat, disabled, multiracial, and often female-identified.
These bodies do not feed the capitalist machine of essentialized “female” bodies as consumable-as selling agents. From the perspective of algorithms and content moderators, the bodies I depict in my paintings are legible only as “inappropriate”-read: pornographic. Like many queer, feminist, trans, POC, fat, disabled, and sex worker artists, I use Instagram in constructive ways, but struggle with the platform’s constant censorship of my work. Many use it for community-building, which can also be life-sustaining. Many of my peers depend on Instagram for their livelihood. I am a queer feminist artist who is active on Instagram, and weary of struggling with being censored there. Read Artist Betty Tompkins's Statement on Instagram's Nudity Policy