Devouring Frida. Margaret A. Lindauer

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СКАЧАТЬ are directed toward the viewer rather than the children next to her. Remarking on the fact that Rivera was married to Frida and sexually involved with Cristina during the production of this mural, Franco asserts that the image presents a social message for women as well as “a male polygamous fantasy” suggested by Cristina’s “voluptuous look and upturned eyes of a woman in orgasm.”⁶⁰ While appearing to demonstrate women’s professional “liberation,” Rivera’s mural also promotes an idealized masculine virility—both sexual and social—by depicting two women, one socially marginalized and the other sexually available. Women may have enjoyed a certain level of professional status and some loosening of sexual mores, they were not free of the passive/active axis that renders the woman professionally subservient and sexually submissive to the active male.

The image placed here in the print version has been intentionally omitted

      Figure 4. Today and Tomorrow: Modern Mexico. Mural by Diego Rivera, 1934. National Palace, Mexico City. Reproduction authorized by the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes y Literatura.

The image placed here in the print version has been intentionally omitted

      Figure 5. A Few Small Nips, 1935. Oil on metal, 15″ × 19″. © Banco de México, Av. 5 de Mayo No. 2, Col. Centro, 06059, México, D.F. 1998. Reproduction authorized by the Banco de México and by the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes y Literatura.

      Kahlo’s painting A Few Small Nips depicts a socially resonant attitude toward actively promiscuous women. The painting is a bloody depiction of a woman with multiple stab wounds, lying on a bed while her attacker, splattered with blood and still holding a knife, stands over her mutilated body. The title was taken from a newspaper report of a man who brutally murdered his unfaithful wife. Upon his arrest, he explained, “But I only gave her a few small nips.”⁶¹ Kahlo’s preparatory sketch for the painting—in which the man explains, “My sweetie doesn’t love me anymore because she gave herself to another bastard, but today I snatched her away, her hour has come”—explicitly indicates that infidelity precipitated the murder.⁶² The woman wears one shoe with stocking and garter pushed down her leg. Her erotic accoutrements hint at the woman’s transgression, which crosses a boundary distinguishing a sexually passive woman from the promiscuous whore, the most culturally stigmatized female in Mexican society. In fact, Herrera characterizes the man as stereotypically macho and the woman a la chingada, a term which, on one hand, simply refers to her victimization.⁶³ According to Octavio Paz the feminine noun la chingada is related to the verb chingar:

      The verb is masculine, active, cruel: it stings, wounds, gashes, stains. And it provokes a bitter resentful satisfaction. The person who suffers this action is passive, inert, and open, in contrast to the active, aggressive, and closed person who inflicts it. The chingón is the macho, the male; he rips open the chingada, the female who is pure passivity, defenseless against the exterior world. The relationship between them is violent and it is determined by the cynical power of the first and the impotence of the second.⁶⁴

      On the other hand, la chingada is a complex cultural classification that suggests a woman’s innate culpability, associated with her sexuality, as the base cause of European penetration and domination of precolonial Mexico. La chingada literally translates as “the fucked one” and refers, in Cherríe Moraga’s words, to the “sexual legacy” of betrayal “pivoting around the historical/mythical female figure of Malintzin Tenepal,” the Aztec translator and mistress to Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés.⁶⁵ Moraga explains, “Upon her shoulders rests the full blame for the ‘bastardization’ of the indigenous people of Mexico. To put it in the most base terms: Malintzin, also called Malinche, fucked the white man who conquered the Indian peoples of México and destroyed their culture.”⁶⁶ Ironically, as Moraga notes, Malinche “is not … an innocent victim, but the guilty party—ultimately responsible for her own sexual victimization.”⁶⁷

      Although Herrera refers to the woman depicted in Kahlo’s painting as la chingada, she does not discuss the cultural signification of Malinche’s sexuality and its association with deception, which is presumed to be inherent in all women. Analogous to Malinche’s guilt as a traitor to the Mexican people, Herrera implies Kahlo’s guilt in Rivera’s affair with her sister (by supposing that because Kahlo assumed the active role of directing Rivera to return to Mexico, she precipitated the affair). Herrera thereby suggests that A Few Small Nips was produced in response to the affair. Richmond also alleges that the painting refers to the emotional pain Kahlo suffered due to Rivera’s callous infidelity, and she proposes that the painting represents reversed gender roles in its “graphic expression of the anger she wishes to vent on his … body.”⁶⁸ Richmond’s words exemplify the paucity of available ways to express female aggression and demonstrate the currency of Malinche mythology. In other words, Richmond implies that Kahlo set out to depict her own anger toward Rivera yet reversed the gendered roles so that, in the painting, a man represented Kahlo’s anger and a woman represented the object of her anger. Thus, according to Richmond’s interpretation, Kahlo’s painting abides by the paradigmatic gender characterizations in order to represent forbidden sexual infidelity. It is significant that the painting itself contains absolutely no visual references to Rivera or Kahlo yet is considered to represent Kahlo’s assumed retribution fantasy against Rivera. No interpretation considers the painting’s potential as a visual explication of repressive social mores that delineate the paradigmatic male and female, distinguished not only in terms of sexual activity but also according to active versus passive behavioral roles. Although unacknowledged, Malinche (la chingada) mythology provides the symbolic cultural basis for reading the gender role reversal, and Richmond’s description of A Few Small Nips demonstrates that ideology is inscribed in interpretation particularly when Kahlo was perceived to be resisting or transgressing highly invested social boundaries.

      By 1935, when Kahlo produced the painting, a spirit of fervent nationalism imbued the drive to regain political and economic control of Mexican culture and industry that, according to la chingada mythologically, initially had been lost to Europe because of Malinche’s betrayal. Thus there is an implied relationship between women’s sexuality and national betrayal, one that remained significant to postrevolutionary discourses in which a woman’s maternal role was associated with national stability. The obverse female role, the fallen woman who was actively promiscuous, thereby symbolized a traitor to postrevolutionary nationalism and implicitly represented the nation’s vulnerability. Within these powerful cultural codes (largely unarticulated in biographies of the artist), Kahlo and Rivera agreed, after their 1935 reconciliation, that neither necessarily would be monogamous. Beyond their mutual understanding and personal perspectives toward sexual mores, Kahlo’s extramarital relationships had an entirely different cultural connotation than Rivera’s. Therefore, it is not surprising that biographies of Kahlo (and Rivera) consistently remark that she was far more discreet in her intimate affairs. Characterizations of Kahlo’s conduct allude to the fact that while Rivera’s liaisons corresponded to stereotypic masculine virility, there was not an equivalent social category in which it was permissible for a woman to engage actively in extramarital relationships. As María Herrera-Sobek explains, Malinche mythology acts as an albatross, and the sexually active woman is cast alongside “the whore who sells her people to the enemy.”⁶⁹

The image placed here in the print version has been intentionally omitted

      Figure 6. Self-Portrait (Dedicated to Leon Trotsky), 1937. Oil on masonite, 30″ × 24″. © Banco de México, Av. 5 de Mayo No. 2, Col. Centro, 06059, México, D.F. 1998. Reproduction authorized by the Banco de México and by the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes y Literatura.

      Discussions of Kahlo’s 1937 Self-Portrait (Dedicated to Leon Trotsky) (figure 6) invariably include remarks regarding Kahlo’s cautious breach of social/sexual principles. By Kahlo’s own account, she had a brief affair with СКАЧАТЬ