Born: May 16, 1987, Houston, Texas
Died: March 12, 2012, Chicago, Illinois
Identity: Queer, transfeminine, genderqueer, fat, femme, Filipino American
Known For: Blogging as CallOutQueen, radical femme performance art, digital resistance to white gay beauty standards, visibility work for queer and trans people of color

Overview

Mark Cagaanan Aguhar was a queer transfeminine Filipino American multimedia artist, writer, and activist whose Tumblr blog CallOutQueen became a defiant altar of femme resistance in the early 2010s. Known for blending glamour and grief, beauty and critique, her work unapologetically challenged the white, thin, cis-male dominance of both queer and art worlds.

Operating at the intersection of personal vulnerability and cultural critique, Aguhar’s practice was not confined to galleries or exhibitions but thrived online, especially through her blog BLOGGING FOR BROWN GURLS. Her selfies, rants, performance videos, watercolors, and poetry created a visual and literary language of survival for brown, fat, femme bodies.

Aguhar’s art was not just a practice of self-love but an act of political resistance. Her mere existence, styled in hair extensions and femme aesthetics, was a confrontation with mainstream narratives of beauty and queerness.

Life and Education

Born in Houston, Texas to a Filipino American family, Mark attended the University of Texas at Austin for her undergraduate studies and was completing her MFA at the University of Illinois at Chicago at the time of her death.

Aguhar’s academic and personal journey were deeply intertwined. As she navigated transness, racial identity, and fat femme embodiment, she crafted art that mirrored her own refusal to compromise with a world hostile to her existence.

She identified as a genderqueer person of color, a fat femme fag feminist, and used both she and they pronouns. Her work was deeply informed by intersectional feminism, queer of color critique, and the aesthetics of drag, misandry, and digital intimacy.

Artistic Practice

Aguhar’s art took many forms:

• Self-portraits and webcam videos featuring her in full femme regalia: hair, makeup, lingerie, and confidence
• Text-based watercolors filled with affirmations like “LOOK AT ME,” “YOU CAN’T CARRY IT WITH YOU,” and “I’D RATHER BE BEAUTIFUL THAN MALE”
• Performance art and live readings, often raw and emotional, focused on her identity and marginalization
• Poetry, including her widely circulated piece Litanies to My Heavenly Brown Body

She created images of gay brown boys in harnesses and collages from queer porn and pop culture. Her Tumblr posts oscillated between casual beauty tips and dense critiques of whiteness and masculinity. She called this “critical flippancy,” a way to both survive and fight.

Aguhar refused to tidy her queerness for consumption. She rejected respectability, normalized misandry, and encouraged fat brown girls to feel divine.

Tumblr and Digital Impact

As CallOutQueen, Aguhar built an online sanctuary for queer brown femmes. Her Tumblr became a living archive of radical beauty, rage, sadness, and critique.

She blogged constantly: selfies, breakdowns, jokes, flirtations, confessions, and rebuttals to hate mail. Her voice was bold, flippant, and searingly intelligent. Her final post before her suicide simply read: “LOL, WHITE MEN BORE ME.”

In her own words:

“My work is about visibility. My work is about the fact that I’m a genderqueer person of color fat femme fag feminist and I don’t really know what to do with that identity in this world.”

Death and Aftermath

Aguhar died by suicide on March 12, 2012. She was 24 and just months away from finishing her MFA. Her death was a profound shock to queer communities that had grown to rely on her words and images for guidance, validation, and power.

Her suicide was not interpreted as surrender but as a complex critique of the world’s failure to make space for people like her. In the weeks after her death, Tumblr was flooded with memorials, reposts, and declarations: Mark is supposed to endure.

Legacy

Aguhar’s impact only grew after her death:

• Litanies to My Heavenly Brown Body became a poem of queer mourning after the 2016 Pulse massacre
• Her work has been featured in exhibitions such as Bring Your Own Body, Nobody Promised You Tomorrow at the Brooklyn Museum, and Torch Song at Gallery 400
• The Mark Aguhar Memorial Grant, launched by Chances Dances in 2012, supports queer trans-feminine artists of color

Critics and scholars including Roy Pérez have written extensively on Aguhar’s aesthetics and political theory, especially her concept of flippancy as a mode of survival. Her art continues to be studied in discussions of queer archives, racialized gender performance, and Tumblr-era activism.

Selected Exhibitions

• 2009: No Lone Zone, Creative Research Lab, Austin, TX
• 2011: M4M, Lawndale Art Center, Houston, TX
• 2012: Torch Song, Gallery 400, UIC, Chicago, IL
• 2015–2016: Bring Your Own Body, Cooper Union and traveling venues
• 2019: Nobody Promised You Tomorrow, Brooklyn Museum

Select Works

• Litanies to My Heavenly Brown Body (poem)
• YOU CAN’T CARRY IT WITH YOU (watercolor text)
• Glamour (performance video, 2012)
• Axes (series of affirmations)

Further Reading and Resources

• Tumblr Archive of CallOutQueen (select posts via Wayback Machine)
• Roy Pérez, “Mark Aguhar’s Critical Flippancy”
• Vice: “I’d Rather Be Beautiful Than Male”
• Brooklyn Museum: Nobody Promised You Tomorrow
• Litanies to My Heavenly Brown Body, Read Aloud