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What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? The world would split open.
-Muriel Rukeyser. "Kathe Kollwitz"
Mine was a strange world
Of criminal silences
Of strangers' watchful eyes
Misreading the evil.
-Frida Kahlo, Diury
Visual artists'... most truthful biographical statements are their images.
-Laurie Schneider Adams, Art and Phychoanalysis
THE MEXICAN ARTIST FRIDA KAHLO (1907-1954), ot European and Mexican indigenous heritage, turned to painting after a life-threatening accident at age eighteen made attending medical school impossible. At twenty-two, she married the well-established painter/muralist Diego Rivera who remained supportive ot her work despite their stormy marriage. In her lifetime she became internationally known as an artist in her own right, but after she died, her work (like that of so mam other women artists) disappeared from public view. She was rediscovered by feminist scholars in the second Wave of the women's movement and has since become an "icon" with a wide, international audience.
This essay offers an alternative reading of a cluster of violent images of "bloody wounds" that pervade her self-portrayals and which, 1 suggest, originate in her experiences of growing up female in a highly patriarchal culture in which girls and women have historically not "owned" their bodies and as a result were frequent objects of sexual abuse not only in the public sphere, but also within the confines of the family.1 Although Kahlo's images of woundings to the female body have been widely understood to represent traumatic physical and psychic pain (childhood illness, the life-threatening accident in which a bus rail pierced her body and the dozens of operations that followed, her elective abortions and bloody miscarriages, Rivera's frequent sexual betrayals), I believe they also suggest traumatic experiences of sexual abuse that were "unsayable" in any other form and were perhaps not even available to conscious thought. Kahlo herself said of her painting, "I didn't expect anything more from my work than the satisfaction it could give me from the very fact of painting and saying what I was unable to say in any other form" (emphasis added).2
Because my "engagement with the unsayable" is at once systematic and deeply intuitive and is rooted in historical as well as psychological contexts, it seems appropriate not only to offer...