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Frida of the Blood-Covered Paint Brush  IN THIS CHAPTER I continue my examination of gendered stereotypes , focusing on the complimentarity of femininity and disease. Historically , femaleness and illness (as opposed to femininity and socially relevant creative production) have been remarkably compatible. Diane Price Herndl characterizes “patriarchal culture as potentially sickening for women and as defining women as inherently sick, especially when they resist its norms,” arguing that “illness can often be simply the label given to women’s moves toward artistic expression.”1 I contend that characterizations of Kahlo’s physical and emotional health exemplify how medical diagnosis colludes with social prescription to maintain gender dichotomies. For example, Herrera asserts that Kahlo uses physical pain, nakedness, and sexuality in her self-portraits not merely as documentation of emotional and corporeal trauma but also “to bring home the message of her suffering.”2 She insinuates that Kahlo’s illustrated claims of pain were exaggerated or distorted to affect an audience, thereby alluding to the impossibility of measuring the veracity of a patient/victim’s expression of pain. As Elaine Scarry explains, pain is “at once something that cannot be denied and cannot be confirmed. . . . To have pain is to have certainty, to hear about pain is to have doubt.”3 Thus the suggestion that Kahlo overstated her suffering represents a paradox of knowing. However, the intensity and consistency with which doubt is cast upon the degree of Kahlo’s pain is itself highly suspect, for it has generated diagnoses of “woman’s disease,” related to neurasthenia, hysteria, and hypochondria. The premise that pain inspired Kahlo’s creative production has compelled some historians to hypothesize that she unconsciously sought anguishing circumstances, including various devastating love affairs and purportedly unnecessary surgeries. Accordingly, Kahlo’s sexuality, physical disabilities , and alleged emotional instability have been entwined as symptoms. Just as Kahlo’s “illnesses” have been cast as a sort of muse that inspired her to paint, the process of painting has been codified as her “therapy.” According to Herrera, the act of painting, for Kahlo, alleviated pain.4 Frida of the Blood-Covered Paint Brush 55 In essence the artist’s self-portraits have come to represent what is considered her “real” pain as well as her “imagined” and “self-inflicted” pain. They are regarded variously as evidence of Kahlo’s despondence in the face of relentless physical and emotional trauma; references to her reputed masochistic tendencies, including hypochondria, alcoholism, and pathological sexuality; and therapeutic expressions that ideally could lead to a psychologically “healthy” acceptance of her social, physical, and sexual status. In this chapter, I analyze five self-portraits produced between 1944 and 1951 that generally are considered to relate directly to Kahlo’s health. I evaluate ways in which these paintings correspond to events in the artist/patient’s life in order to demonstrate how descriptions of her work correspond to constructions of “woman’s disease.” Like other authors, I look at Kahlo’s paintings as tangible creations through which one may examine the intangibility, internalization, and subjectivity of pain, but I also analyze how the medical/cultural perception of Kahlo as a patient structures the treatment of her paintings.5 Furthermore, I present interpretations of Kahlo’s work that critique the process through which Kahlo has been diagnosed and examine ways in which she depicted her body as both recording and resisting social/medical discourse on femininity and illness. Kahlo’s medical history has been constructed in ways that are similar to fictional representations of diseased women, consonant to patriarchal prescription. As a construction rather than a testimony of historical truth, I consider Kahlo’s medical history as a fictional “portrait of the sufferer,” a category that Sander Gilman argues “is the image of the disease anthropomorphized.”6 I accordingly show how narratives that allegedly constitute a measure of Kahlo’s physical, emotional, and sexual health essentially cast the artist as a personification of “woman ’s disease.” There is no doubt that Kahlo endured intense physical pain throughout her life. In a horrific 1925 collision between a bus and trolley, Kahlo was impaled on a metal handrail that entered her lower torso, breaking her spinal column and pelvis and exiting through her vagina. The peculiarity as well as the severity of the accident undoubtedly kindles its ceaseless retelling . Kahlo and Alejandro Gómez Arias were sitting next to each other in the bus when it was struck. Gómez Arias, who was badly cut but...

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