Devouring Frida. Margaret A. Lindauer

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ though unexamined in Herrera’s discussion of their divorce as well as in her interpretation of Kahlo’s 1940 Self-Portrait with Cropped Hair. In the painting, Kahlo wears a man’s suit, an explicit masculine affectation. Her hair is cut short, and she is surrounded by the shorn locks while still holding a pair of scissors. The song lyrics above her read, “Mira que si te quise, fué por el pelo, Ahora que estás pelona, ya no te quiero” (If I loved, it was for your hair, Now that you are bald, I don’t love you any more). Based on these aspects of the painting and on the assumption that Kahlo was both furious and thoroughly devastated by the divorce, Herrera concludes that the painting represents Kahlo’s irrational reprisal. She contends that “retaliation [against Rivera] is expressed” by Kahlo’s decision to cut her hair.⁸⁹ Herrera notes that Kahlo holds the scissors “near her genitals” and points out that from them a lock of hair “hangs between her legs like a murdered animal [symbolizing] a violent rejection of femininity.”⁹⁰ And Herrera laments that because Kahlo has attacked her own sexuality, she “has committed a vengeful act that serves to heighten her loneliness.”⁹¹ Thus the song lyrics, according to Herrera, indicate that Kahlo mocked her recklessness by painting a self-portrait that is “nothing more than the illustration of a popular song.”⁹² In other words, Herrera sees the painting as illustrating the depths of Kahlo’s despair and the futility of her irrational response. In Herrera’s view, Kahlo not only suffered from Rivera’s absence but also from her own foolish decision to cast aside her femininity (by dressing in a suit and cutting her hair) and then finding only loneliness in its place. Herrera further surmises that Kahlo recognized the uselessness of rejecting femininity and adopting a masculine persona, suggesting that the song lyrics represent a self-mockery indicating Kahlo’s acknowledgment, in the painting, that the “symbolic cutting away of vulnerability and attachment does not, of course, arrest the malignancy of sorrow.”⁹³ The painting thereby represents, in Herrera’s interpretation, Kahlo’s anger, despair, and realization that acquiring a masculine image is futile.

      Herrera’s interpretation reinforces gender codes without evaluating how the painting may employ them as a means to critique or subvert moralizing social prescription. And her interpretation has set a precedent. Richmond reiterates Herrera’s contention that the painting is “a vengeful picture,” explaining that Kahlo “holds the scissors in front of her genital area with intent, in fantasy, to maim her betraying husband, whose enormous suit she wears.”⁹⁴ Also, Richmond asserts that Kahlo associated her long hair with sexuality and strength. In the painting, “it is all over the floor, like spilled blood. She looks out of the painting at Diego with a slight smirk on her face. He, too, loved her hair, and now, like him, it is gone. She has become a man without her man.”⁹⁵ By stating that Kahlo dresses in Rivera’s clothing and that he is the intended audience for this self-portrait—“She looks out of the painting at Diego”—Richmond disregards Kahlo’s professional success in exhibiting and selling her work.⁹⁶ She implicitly assumes that Kahlo did not paint with a broader audience in mind; thus Richmond excludes Kahlo from the realm of paradigmatic artist, relegating her to the feminine, emotional realm of private experience and limited audience. Furthermore, by suggesting that the artist’s “sexuality” and emotional “strength” are represented by her hair, Richmond essentializes Kahlo according to her feminine attributes, with their ability to attract male sexual attention. Her suggestion that Kahlo “holds the scissors in front of her genital area with intent, in fantasy, to maim her betraying husband” is a classic invocation of castration fear. Richmond’s interpretation thus is saturated with gender stereotypes, based on assumptions about Kahlo’s emotional response to divorce.

      If we scrutinize the composition, it becomes apparent that some descriptions supporting prescriptive interpretations are in fact mistakes. Most notably, Kahlo does not wear an “enormous” suit. In fact, it accommodates her proportions—the shoulder seams do not droop and the sleeves and pant legs are an appropriate length. Thus she does not wear Rivera’s clothing, as had been suggested. Second, Kahlo has not, in the painting, “violently rejected femininity”; she wears earrings and women’s shoes. So Kahlo has not presented herself as a man (Richmond’s intimation). Rather she has combined feminine and masculine attributes, situating herself in an enigmatic category between feminine and masculine stereotypes. In Sarah Lowe’s words, Kahlo “challenges the viewer to see her as a woman” denying classification of herself into strict gender codes by combining masculine and feminine features but also by including attributes that have shifting significance according to gender association.⁹⁷ In this sense, the self-portrait presents one possibility for liberating the female from patriarchally defined gender tyranny, not in order to become a man, but to have available some of the social privileges symbolically reserved for men.⁹⁸ Predominant interpretations demonstrate the pervasiveness of gender mythologies, thereby representing the difficulty of transcending gender dichotomies, as researchers draw upon ubiquitous metaphors and paradigms, which themselves are constructed with gender codes. For example, the significance of the scissors shifts according to gender association. If Kahlo is a “man,” the scissors are a phallic symbol, erect and between the artist’s legs. Hair still drapes (drips) from them. Other strands look alive, swimming and squirming as if they are the progeny of the scissors. At the same time, if Kahlo is a “woman,” the scissors indicate the Freudian already-castrated woman and the male fear of the female castrator. As Jane Flax describes it, “what is feared in ‘castration’ is to lack or lose a penis—that is, to be or become a female. . . . Such a lack necessarily entails exclusion from the more privileged masculine world, from ‘constant association with men,’ upon whom one is ‘dependent’ to achieve any ‘cultural aims.’ ”⁹⁹ In other words, from a masculine point of view, feminization is regarded as a cultural demotion. Conversely, masculinization is desired for its social privilege.

      Kahlo’s short hair is another shifting signifier for sexual-gender identity, and her haircut has been cast as an aggressive rejection of feminine prescription. As a woman, her short hair is not merely a “rueful jest,” for having extremely short hair is an act that raises questions regarding her femininity. Hair is a highly charged physical feature but also a symbolic, gendered act. Gender identity in Mexico refers much more to active (masculine) versus passive (feminine) “acts,” and is distinct from hegemonic European-American societal gender codes constructed in reference to sexual “object choice” that categorizes people as homosexual or heterosexual (with bisexuality as a complex sexual identity to which neither “homosexual” nor “heterosexual” fields feel an affinity). As Almaguer explains, the categories of “gay” and “lesbian” identify a person according to sexual attraction—that is, “the biological sex of the person toward whom sexual activity is directed.”¹⁰⁰ Conversely, in a Latin American sexual system, it is not the biological sex of Kahlo’s sexual partners that is important but rather her sexual identity was determined by the acts she performed or wished to perform. In relation to Latin American codes, Kahlo’s “cropped hair” is sexually significant. Growing hair is passive (feminine); cutting hair is active (masculine). In Kahlo’s painting, the “active” quality of her cut hair is clear. The strands of hair are strewn about the composition, and the scissors are implicated as either a phallic or a castrating weapon. In this respect, the depiction of Kahlo’s haircut perhaps is not emphasized enough in interpretations of the painting, for the artist’s short hair coupled with her divorce (itself signifying a rejection of the feminine domestic realm) cast her as a suspected sexual renegade, an aggressive, scorned woman not above taking revenge through castration upon herself and upon others, thereby betraying a highly invested cultural gendered system.

      Kahlo’s 1939 painting Two Nudes in a Forest (figure 8) also is considered symbolically indicative of Kahlo’s social/sexual “offenses” in relation to both hegemonic European-American and Latin American socialization categories. It generally is interpreted as an indication of the artist’s bisexuality. Herrera surmises that, although not obvious, the painting may depict Kahlo with a lover.¹⁰¹ In terms of the European-American “object choice” sexual system, Kahlo is cast in the “awkward” in-between category to which neither homosexual or heterosexual stereotypes apply. СКАЧАТЬ