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IN THE EARLY 1970s Frida Kahlo was only known as a subject for interpretation and admiration among a small academic and artworld audience. Films, exhibitions, and publications produced in the 1970s and early 1980s generated the shift, in the United States, from seeing Kahlo as unsung artist to Frida as venerated heroine. Among her biographers and admirers she is referred to simply as Frida, which indicates the mythologizing of the artist but also imparts a sense of intimate familiarity between painter and admirers. By 1991 when New York’s Metropolitan Museum used one of Kahlo’s self-portraits to advertise the traveling exhibition Mexico: Splendors of Thirty Centuries on billboards, in newspapers, and within museums, Kahlo’s popularity had reached “cult” status, and her notoriety permeated United States popular culture.¹ The so-called Frida-look was copied in high fashion magazines and look-alike contests; museum gift shops offered postcards, T-shirts, and jewelry incorporating Kahlo’s self-portraits; and specialty shops commemorating Kahlo’s life and work sold Frida nail polish, Frida shoes, and Frida clothing. Also in 1991, Madonna, the popular singer/performer, repeatedly broadcast her admiration for Kahlo, her purchase of two Kahlo paintings, and her plans to play the lead role in a new film about the artist. Madonna’s self-promoted idolization further advanced Kahlo’s name in a popular realm represented by such magazines as Vanity Fair, Style, and Mirabella. Since then, several photography exhibitions on Kahlo have been produced; a number of new monographs and essays about the artist have been published; and a flurry of Kahlo-inspired paintings, performances, films, and musicals have been created by several other artists.

Edward Sullivan explains that Kahlo has attained such celebrity status, which goes far beyond the success she enjoyed during her lifetime and is astounding when compared to the obscurity that followed her death, because she is “a role model for many people—feminists, lesbians, gay men and others who were searching for a hero—someone to validate their struggle to find their own voice and their own public personalities. Frida, as a woman of personal and aesthetic strength and courage, met that need.”² Although Sullivan’s judgment is valid, it begs further analysis. Why do those who are “searching for a hero,” who “struggle to find their own voice,” celebrate Kahlo? What specifically about her life—or, more accurately, the way her life has been recounted—constitutes the “strength and courage” that politically disenfranchised or marginalized groups admire? Through what assumptions and ideologies has the artist been venerated? And in what ways has the mythic Frida, as “a role model,” affected the representation of “feminists, lesbians, gay men and others” within hegemonic United States culture?

This book responds to these questions by analyzing the language of interpretation and veneration through which the popular persona “Frida Kahlo” has been constructed. I examine Kahlo’s self-portraits for references to political and cultural complexities incorporated in the production and reception of her paintings. And I investigate the processes through which, and the implications of how, the artist has been idolized. Her posthumous transformation from forgotten painter to celebrated heroine has cast her as numerous, sometimes contradictory, characters. She is renowned for her devastatingly unfilled desire for children and also for her overt challenges to bourgeois social/sexual expectations. She sometimes is described as a politically involved nationalist but also as Diego Rivera’s devoted wife, who parroted her husband’s political opinions. She is variously held as a “great” artist but also is noted for the strictly personal references of her paintings. She is recognized for her involvement in campaigns for women’s and minority rights although her behavior was characterized by an obsession to arouse men’s libidos with her theatrical costumes and flirtatious behavior. Each of these descriptions has developed alongside interpretations of her self-portraits, which, in turn, correlate the temporal point of production to events in the artist’s life as documented in Kahlo’s letters and diary and through the recollections of colleagues and acquaintances. For example, Kahlo produced Henry Ford Hospital in 1932 shortly after a life-threatening miscarriage. The painting is considered to illustrate the artist’s mourning for her aborted child and despair over her apparent physical inability to carry a child to term. This one-to-one association of life events to the meaning of a painting follows the paradigmatic art history model described by Mieke Bal and Norman Bryson; the “purpose of art-historical narration is to merge the authorized corpus and its producer into a single entity, the totalized narrative of the-man-and-his-work, in which the rhetorical figure author=corpus governs the narration down to its finest details.”³

My analyses of Kahlo’s paintings disrupt the author=corpus narrative by probing the relationship among the artist’s paintings and the social constructs that extend beyond the events of her personal life. While I do not dispute the scholarship behind the production of Kahlo’s biographies, represented most thoroughly in Hayden Herrera’s 1983 Frida: A Biography of Frida Kahlo, my analysis recognizes that any biography, like an interpretation of a painting, is not discovered but produced. I use the term “biography” in reference to publications about Kahlo’s life ranging from popular to academic, celebratory to analytical, captious to venerate. An entrenched narrative of suffering permeates the telling of her life. While considering the representation of Kahlo that has emerged from the combined efforts of researchers, filmmakers, artists, and ardent admirers, it is crucial to keep in mind that Kahlo’s life, like any biography, is recounted so that a chronology is made into a cohesive narrative by concentrating on events, and associations among events. Tautologically, selected events become relevant as a persona emerges from an investigation of historical evidence, including letters, diaries, exhibition reviews, interviews, and paintings. Kahlo’s character development and life story have been produced simultaneously, in accordance with one another, in such a way that various social classifications—nationalist, invalid, rebel, hypochondriac, lesbian, adoring wife, childless mother, sexually desired object, antibourgeois, communist—are seen as being illustrated in her paintings. Furthermore, among biographies of Kahlo, and therefore throughout interpretations of her paintings that emulate the author=corpus model, these classifications generally revolve around two core aspects of her life, her tumultuous marriage to Diego Rivera and the interminable deterioration of her body. Kahlo’s own words from a 1951 newspaper interview have been cited consistently to support the centrality of these circumstances. She remorsed, “I have suffered two grave accidents in my life. One in which a streetcar ran over me. . . . The other accident is Diego.”⁴ The streetcar accident refers to the horrifying, life-threatening 1925 accident in which an iron handrail impaled Kahlo’s torso, causing extensive injuries and lifelong physical complications. The Rivera “accident” alludes to Kahlo’s anguish over his notorious womanizing. Thus her statement is taken as evidence that her life was emotionally and physically torturous, and her paintings accordingly are interpreted as documents of her pain.

It is tempting to condense Kahlo’s life into a narrative of emotional and physical health, first because biographers’ interviews with the artist’s colleagues and acquaintances bind significant events, passions, and idiosyncratic characteristics of the artist’s life to her marriage and/or illnesses. And second, it allows for a heroic/tragic drama. Because Kahlo’s life has been recounted as a litany of physical and psychological symptoms, she is revered for her “triumph” in creating art despite the “torment” of bodily and emotional injury. A pervasive torment/triumph approach can be gleaned from a cursory glance at monograph and essay titles: Andrea Kettenmann’s Frida Kahlo: Pain and Passion; Malka Drucker’s Frida Kahlo: Torment and Triumph in Her Life and Art; Martha Zamora’s Brush of Anguish; Nancy Breslow’s “Cry of Joy and Pain”; Hayden Herrera’s “Frida Kahlo: The Palette, the Pain and the Painter”; and Gloria Orenstein’s “Painting for Miracles.” (There are notable exceptions to the preponderant heroic/tragic interpretations of Kahlo, which are cited in subsequent chapters and from which many of my ideas have developed.)

While recognizing Kahlo’s resilience fosters admiration, it also implicitly solemnizes the tribulations of her life so that celebrating her strength simultaneously and necessarily evokes sympathy for her pain. Accordingly, Herrera evaluates Kahlo’s entire oeuvre, and her late-twentieth-century popularity, in terms of bipolarities subsumed within the overarching battle between surrendering to pain and struggling for survival:

There is the tension created by Kahlo’s festive, becostumed exterior and her anguished interior. There is a split between her mask of control and the turmoil that thrashed inside her head. Even as she presented herself as a heroine, she insisted that we know her vulnerability. And while she was compelled to see herself and to be truly seen, she hid behind the mythic creature she invented to help her withstand life’s blows. . . . [H]er self-portraits . . . were not just a means to communicate feeling, but a device to keep feeling in check. Thus while her paintings draw us into her power, they also frustrate. They are steely in their distance and obdurate in their silence . . . forc[ing] us to come face to face with Frida . . . and . . . with unexplored parts of ourselves.⁵

Herrera’s appraisal insinuates that the act of painting was emotionally exhausting for Kahlo and that the act of viewing her paintings is emotionally exhausting for Kahlo’s admirers, in essence suggesting that Kahlo’s paintings devour the artist as well as the audience. The production of paintings is, in Herrera’s judgment, thought to have depleted the artist’s pain but also to have consumed her energy as she sought to control “the turmoil that thrashed inside her head.” The painted products then superseded the actual being of Frida Kahlo and replaced her with “the mythic creature she invented” and “hid behind.” And this mythic creature depicted in self-portraits devours its audience “draw[ing] us into her power,” and yet, “steely in their distance and obdurate in their silence,” the paintings do not soothe the “anguished interior” of the artist or “unexplored areas of ourselves.” The title Devouring Frida refers to these aspects of Kahlo’s constructed persona and reception and also to the canons and theories that seamlessly have been incorporated into the mythic Frida. In other words, Kahlo herself is construed as devouring, expending herself and her audience, but she also is devoured, consumed by the implicit ideologies of the author=corpus paradigm. Within those biographies that do not acknowledge theoretical applications and assumptions, there are indeed ideologies at work in the seemingly benign, objective quest for historical facts that, together, recount Kahlo’s dramatic life. I argue that the “mythic Frida” narrative eradicates the social and cultural negotiations that mediate recollections by colleagues and acquaintances, thereby impeding an analysis of Kahlo’s paintings as representations of political inquiry. For example, as I argue in the chapter on “Frida as a Wife/Artist in Mexico,” the symbolic significance of motherhood relevant to postrevolutionary reconstruction in Mexico is apparent in recollections of Kahlo’s miscarriage and perpetuated in interpretations of Henry Ford Hospital. My analysis of the painting takes postrevolutionary nationalism into account as I look beyond the personal iconography of the self-portrait for references to social and political prescription and resistance.

Countering the author=corpus approach that leads to the “devouring” mythology of Kahlo, I undertake a semiotic, feminist analysis of the mechanisms through which the Frida myth has been constructed. Semiotic theory offers a methodological process for investigating the construction of meaning, context, artist, and audience, whereas feminist art history promotes theoretical reasoning for why I should want to dilute Frida’s mythic status. I embark on this project not simply to show how ideologies are written into interpretation but to interrogate the celebratory aura surrounding Kahlo’s mythic persona. It is important to recognize that, as the feminist dictum declares, the personal is political. Characterizations of Kahlo’s emotional and physical well-being invoke cultural definitions of health and illness, gender relations, social restrictions, sexual expectations, and creative production. As Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen note, “The phrase ‘the personal is political’ rejects the traditional exclusion and repression of the personal in male-dominated politics. It also asserts the political nature of women’s private individualized oppression.”⁶ Texts that most powerfully relegate Kahlo to a feminine sphere of apolitical art and private life uncritically and insidiously sequester the artist from broader social contexts.

Even some recent essays that set out to broaden the social relevance of the artist’s work maintain a patriarchally defined gender prescription that empowers the male by disempowering the female cultural domains. Kahlo’s biography, and thus the commemoration of her life and work, have been composed through various and specific cultural lenses that, despite claiming to reveal, have distorted the politics of Kahlo’s life. For example, as I discuss in the chapter on “Unveiling Politics,” Kahlo’s ethnic clothing and self-portraits in Mexican dress generally have been interpreted to represent Kahlo’s fervent nationalism, or mexicanidad. While this conclusion has a certain validity, it is not specific, for there were many “nationalisms” in postrevolutionary Mexico. Artists, intellectuals, and politicians debated the country’s self-definition and its social, political agenda. However, an investigation of Kahlo’s specific political views has been precluded by the generalized assertion that she embraced her heritage. (This omission partly is a reflection of the difficulty in discerning women’s political views from historical records written by key male politicians, activists, artists, and social critics.)

Most of Kahlo’s biographers implicitly recognize the constructedness of interpretation.⁷ For example, Robin Richmond notes that Kahlo and Rivera “were the world’s most inventive and consummate confabulators. . . . They told different people what they wanted them to know.”⁸ In the introduction to her biography of Kahlo, Martha Zamora cautions the reader that her research was carried out twenty-seven years after Kahlo’s death, by which time the artist’s colleagues and friends relied on “selected memory” that “filters out what hurts, combines the incidents that remain, and then adapts them to the form it wants to remember.”⁹ Zamora’s description of memory as a filter does not necessarily lead to a rejection of the recollections by Kahlo’s contemporaries. There is unquestionable value in incorporating these recollections, although they must be recognized, in themselves, as having been constructed within ideological, historical, and political contexts. By starting with the view that the artist’s social and gendered positions are not absolute but rather are rendered by the very discourses used to describe them, I implore that Kahlo’s identity not been seen as static. Thus I consider paintings and interpretations semiotically in terms of cultural constructs. Semiotic analysis, Bal and Bryson explain,

does not set out in the first place to produce interpretations of works of art, but rather to investigate how works of art are intelligible to those who view them, the processes by which viewers make sense of what they see. Standing somewhat to one side of the work of interpretation, semiotics has as its object to describe the conventions and conceptual operations that shape what viewers do—whether those viewers are art historians, art critics, or the crowd of spectators attending an exhibition.¹⁰

To consider “conventions and conceptual operations” among “viewers” is to reconfigure the context in which Kahlo’s paintings were produced and interpreted by shifting attention slightly away from the artist to include the social discourses through which Kahlo’s colleagues, critics, and historians encountered her work.

Semiotics does not disavow the analysis of determinants but recognizes that one’s view of context is necessarily partial. For example, as I address in the chapter on “Frida of the Blood-Covered Paint Brush,” some interpretations of Kahlo’s self-portraits consider the artist’s pain to be the determining context in which the paintings were created. Herrera states, “she painted mostly self-portraits, suggesting that the confinement of invalidism led to a confinement in subject matter. Indeed the peculiar intensity of her paintings convinces us that they were somehow therapeutic, crucial to the artist’s well being.”¹¹ Herrera thereby conflates Kahlo’s painting and pain. Although her self-portraits unquestionably include biographical and medical references, they go beyond documenting the individual to include broader political, social, and economic referents in representations of a woman negotiating her gendered position in relation to dominant social and political directives. I do not disagree completely with strictly biographic interpretations of Kahlo’s work. Indeed, I rely on the work by other scholars even when I do not espouse the same theoretical approach. However, I argue against the view that Kahlo’s work is strictly self-referential, a conjecture exemplified, for example, by Richmond’s proclamation that “Frida was a woman who defined herself politically—but she did not make political paintings.”¹² Clearly, as Joan Borsa asserts, “the critical reception of [Kahlo’s] exploration of subjectivity and personal history has all too frequently denied or de-emphasized the politics involved in examining one’s own location, inheritances and social conditions.”¹³ Thus rather than accepting Kahlo’s history of physical and emotional pain as the context in which her paintings were produced, I incorporate analyses of masculinist canons and histories in order to evaluate the engendered classifications of artist, wife, patient, and political activist that have been reproduced through the construction of “mythic Frida” and her “apolitical” paintings.

In response to Linda Nochlin’s question “why have there been no great women artists?” the grand art history canon was extended in the 1970s, through work by women artists and art historians, to rediscover forgotten women artists.¹⁴ Kahlo, as a subject for research, was prominent in this project carried out by “first generation” feminist art historians. This term, coined by Thalia Gouma-Peterson and Patricia Mathews, refers to scholars with an “unspoken but still apparent objective, to prove that women have been as accomplished, even if not as ‘great’ as men, and to try to place women artists within the traditional historical framework.”¹⁵ Many of these historians focused on stylistic analyses and biographic chronologies in such a way that each woman artist incorporated into the canon was accorded stylistic forebears. André Breton and Henri Rousseau were deemed influential to the unique blend of surrealism and primitivism with which Kahlo integrated Mexican compositional features, particularly those reminiscent of votive paintings and retablos. Feminist critiques argued that, while rediscovering forgotten artists, first generation methodology allowed dominant structures based on “masculine” models to persist. Thus feminist scholars whom Gouma-Peterson and Mathews designate as “second generation” embarked on a different theoretical inquiry as they disclosed the consequences of integrating women artists into the canon without disrupting the masculine paradigm of “great artist.” Generally, the masculinist category “artist” integrates patriarchal gender stereotypes that reserve public space and historically relevant activity, including the production of socially and aesthetically significant paintings, for aggressive, active men while relegating women to a domestic sphere where their activities are invisible and inconsequential to the outside world. As Griselda Pollock explains, the attempt simply to annex a woman artist to the existing art history canon does not, indeed cannot, shift its masculinist paradigm.¹⁶ The woman is framed in a relative, secondary position by the patriarchal discourses of art history in which the commemoration of her private, autobiographical art consigns her to an insignificant role in history. She cannot be judged to be as great as the male artists because she does not paint the masculine subjects that make an artist great. In Pollock’s words, “The discourses which produce the gendered definitions of the artist and creativity have ideological effects in reproducing socially determined categories of masculinity and femininity.”¹⁷ Thus second generation feminist scholarship critiques the mechanisms through which the canon maintains the paradigmatic artist as masculine, sexually aggressive, and socially outcast by incorporating poststructuralist, semiotic, and psychoanalytic theories in order to reconstitute a history focusing on the specificity of individual (versus mythic or paradigmatic) women both as artists and as subjects.

Art history is but one among numerous masculinist canons at work in Frida mythology. Chloe Furnival, for example, asserts that in Latin American histories women are “pigeonholed resembling either the supposed treacherous whore or the self-abnegating mother or the socially deviant scholar.”¹⁸ And analogous to the first generation/second generation theoretical and methodological distinctions of feminist art history, feminist scholars endeavor to renegotiate the terms under which women are included into the existing historical narrative rather than simply slotting more women into the canon. For instance, the Latin American and Caribbean Women’s Collective argues against “limit[ing] women’s demand for liberation to a question of personal fulfillment,” cautioning that when woman’s “struggle . . . remains at the level of individual demands, [it] does not begin to touch upon the social structure from which domination stems.”¹⁹ Both European and Latin American masculinist discourses permeate the recollections of Kahlo’s colleagues and acquaintances and thus are perpetuated in interpretations of the artist’s paintings and the celebration of the mythic Frida. In this book, I do not set out merely to recognize what these interpretations are and how they work, but also to analyze how her position as a woman artist is, in Lisa Tickner’s words, “repressed, refracted or revealed in her work.”²⁰ Accordingly I articulate the social and cultural positions of “artist” and “woman” within the European canon and within postrevolutionary Mexico in order to disrupt totalizing narratives that restrict the possible considerations of women’s histories. However, just as “artist” and “woman” are not monolithic categories, the distinction between “masculinist” and “feminist” discourse must also acknowledge cultural, historical, racial, and economic differences. Thus I am alert to the relationships among feminisms, particularly the description, or in Cherríe Moraga’s view, the trivialization, of the women’s movement as a “white middle-class thing, having little to offer women of color.”²¹ But, Moraga argues, so-called white middle-class feminist theory does provide important means for understanding particular circumstances facing women of color who endure and resist economic, racial, or cultural oppression. In other words, feminist studies articulate distinct ways in which oppression influences the lives of women versus men.²²

The next two chapters focus on how the narrative of Kahlo’s biography, including interpretations of her self-portraits, revolves around her marriage to Rivera and her health. It is difficult to separate an analysis of the artist’s marital history from her medical history because interpretations of her paintings have converged these two aspects of her life into a single persona. For example, Herrera suggests that because Kahlo’s illnesses often coincided with marital disharmony, it seems likely that she used illness as a way to sustain Rivera’s obligation to her.²³ Yet it is precisely in order to rebuff such a totalization that I treat each characterization separately. Thus “Frida as a Wife/Artist in Mexico” concentrates on events that are historicized primarily in relation to Kahlo’s marriage, including her miscarriages and extramarital affairs. On one hand, she is recalled as having been an adoring wife devastated by her unfulfilled “feminine” desire to have children. On the other hand, colleagues and acquaintances recall her “unfeminine” sexual promiscuity. These divergent characterizations are made coherent in a narrative progressing from marital bliss to disillusionment and, ultimately, acceptance of Rivera’s “incorrigible” infidelity. The chronology of her marriage coincides significantly with her success as an artist. As an adoring wife, her painting is presumed to be a hobby; disillusioned by marital infidelity, her painting becomes a career; and concurrent to accepting the particularities of her relationship to Rivera, her painting is seen to commemorate their marriage. As a means for examining the coincidental progressions of marriage and career, I incorporate analyses of postrevolutionary gender prescriptions delineating the feminine classification of wife and the masculine classification of artist into interpretations of Kahlo’s self-portraits. I thereby examine the political implications for traversing masculine and feminine territories, as exemplified in interpretations of Kahlo’s life and work.

“Frida of the Blood-Covered Paint Brush” extends my analysis of ideologies inscribed in the constructed Frida persona to demonstrate how, in an author=corpus approach, Kahlo’s self-portraits are held as evidence of her physical and emotional health. The self-portraits also are used to support diagnoses of Kahlo’s “woman’s disease,” symptoms of which include hypochondria, masochism, and reprobate sexuality. Authors explicitly characterize Kahlo as obsessed with her health, arguing that a certain degree of her physical and emotional pain was fabricated and that she exaggerated her suffering in order to manipulate Rivera and others. Her self-portraits also are interpreted as overstating her pain and confirming her obsession. Zamora maintains that Kahlo created an intense, emotive pictorial oeuvre that reflects her obsession with her health and suffering.²⁴ And Herrera declares that Kahlo “uses bodily wounds [in her paintings] to suggest psychic injury. . . . The greater the pain she wished to convey—especially pain caused by rejection from Diego—the bloodier Frida’s self-portraits became.”²⁵ Biographers extend the consideration of self-inflicted wounds depicted in her self-portrait to suggest that Kahlo convinced doctors to perform unnecessary surgeries. In other words, the implication is that in her life, as in her paintings, Kahlo’s wounds were self-inflicted. As I demonstrate, the consequence of considering Kahlo willfully guilty of her own ill health is that her physical suffering and emotional despair are construed as “particularly appropriate and just punishment”; if only she had followed social and medical prescriptions, biographies suggest, her suffering would have been alleviated.²⁶ Because this conclusion is extremely unsettling, though not unusual in the history of “woman’s disease,” I disrupt the symptomatic interpretations of Kahlo and her paintings by comparing the artist’s “illness” to filmic representations of diseased women, thereby showing the constructedness of Kahlo as paradigmatically diseased. And I identify ways in which paintings that allude to medical procedures also objectify medical discourse, recasting Kahlo as a critic aware of the social implications of diagnoses, rather than strictly a patient at the mercy of medical establishment.

In “The Language of the Missing Mother” and “Unveiling Politics,” I shift from focusing on Kahlo herself as the site of production and examine ways in which broader “contexts” have advanced the mythic Frida. In the first of these two chapters I present issues surrounding the debate over whether Kahlo was a surrealist. My investigation of surrealism as a “context” of production and reception implicitly analyzes how the art history canon operates. When Kahlo first exhibited her paintings in New York, she was widely received as a surrealist artist largely due to André Breton’s proclamation that in Kahlo, and in Mexico generally, he had discovered “pure surreality.”²⁷ In subsequent years, Kahlo made a conscientious effort to repudiate her affiliation with Breton and with surrealism. Numerous scholars accept Kahlo’s disassociation, and some further argue that the surrealist movement was essentially European and had little relevance to the Mexican cultural history from which Kahlo’s paintings derived. I grant that in classifying Kahlo as a surrealist, Breton actively produced meaning, thereby imposing a femininely passive role for Kahlo as well as disregarding Mexico’s political and aesthetic distinction from Europe. However, as I examine Breton’s appropriation of Kahlo for surrealism and Kahlo’s subsequent protestations against a surrealist classification of her paintings, I establish the usefulness of considering the manifestation, in Kahlo’s work, of surrealism’s theoretical interest in the unconscious as a means to confront the implicit irrelevance of women to masculinist canons and histories. I argue that Kahlo’s paintings inscribe and resist surrealism’s woman, using the visual language of surrealism but not restricting her self-representation to the objectification of a female body as a sexualized body. In other words, the “surrealism” implied in Breton’s discovery of Kahlo is distinct from the “surrealism” of Kahlo’s paintings. To give credence to Breton’s declaration is to delineate Kahlo’s subjectivity within masculinist practice. However, denying Kahlo’s paintings critical access to the language of surrealism maintains masculinist authority; when Kahlo decidedly is NOT a surrealist, the decision accedes to patriarchal authority to assign classifications of women’s art based on histories that deny women access to theoretical production. Classifying Kahlo as a surrealist is problematic only when submitting to masculinist authority to define “woman.” Conversely, considering how surrealist language operates in Kahlo’s paintings promotes an investigation of her creative production as a site where definitions of sexual difference for women, in Teresa de Lauretis’s words, “gives femaleness its meaning as the experience of a female subject.”²⁸

The analysis, in the chapter on “The Language of the Missing Mother,” of how a dominant language operates in interpretations of “Kahlo as woman” corresponds to my examination, in “Unveiling Politics,” of symbolic systems through which the classification “Kahlo as Mexican” has been presented. Whereas Kahlo’s paintings explicitly depicting the geographic and political juxtaposition of Mexico and the United States have been interpreted as an indication of the artist’s distaste for U.S. society, her paintings also do not idealize Mexico (though many authors conclude otherwise). I assert that while Kahlo’s paintings have been assumed to represent her fervent nationalism, they also integrate complex perspectives toward, and consequences of, defining Mexicanness. Kahlo grew up during the Mexican Revolution of 1910 to 1920, a time when national identity was scrutinized, torn apart, and reformulated with successive presidential administrations, some of which lasted only a year before being violently ousted by the next political regeneration of nationalism. During the ten years of revolution, the nation’s self-definition was fluid and contested, ultimately accounting for the postrevolutionary campaign for social and political stability embodied in the Utopian view of the “mestizo,” the Mexican of mixed native and European heritage. But by the 1930s, when Kahlo produced a number of paintings that emphasized native Mexican objects and culture, a wave of “antinationalism” charged the project of defining Mexicanness with paralyzing the country’s postrevolutionary political and economic recovery. As political administrations changed and political ideologies shifted from the 1920s through the 1940s, Mexican artists actively producing socially relevant artworks incorporated references to the dynamic debates over national identity. I therefore reexamine a series of Kahlo’s self-portraits in which her ethnic dress is a significant compositional element that generally has been considered to reflect her fervent, yet strictly personal, self-identification with Mexican heritage. I elaborate extensively on this association in relation to broader historical trends and political debate.

Together, these four chapters show that description, interpretation, and ideology are interwoven (though not equally overt) in biographies of Frida Kahlo. Through my analysis of how the mythic Frida was produced and is recirculated incessantly, I disclose the subtle yet effective processes through which Kahlo’s creative, political production has been marginalized as documentary, private record. In “Fetishizing Frida,” I focus on analogous processes inscribed in the mechanisms of Fridamania (the so-called frenzied cult following reflected by mass-market circulation of objects bearing Kahlo’s image). I identify ways in which Fridamania slights the specifics of individual histories, of both Kahlo and her admirers, by perpetuating the celebration of resilience through sympathizing suffering. I demonstrate ways in which the popularized Frida is both repressed and oppressive, the image accompanied by a moralizing narrative explicating the debilitating “punishment” Kahlo suffered because of her resistance against the paradigmatic woman’s roles as articulated in masculinist discourses. But I also propose that Kahlo’s popularity commemorates, and thereby potentially perpetuates, the artist’s resistance against hegemonic domination.