Abstract
In Remembrance of an Open Wound (1938), Mexican artist Frida Kahlo painted herself seated in a chair against a barren landscape, staring with an unyielding and unashamed returned gaze at the viewer and lifting her Tehuana-Mexican dress to display her bare legs. Her left leg, which caused the artist pain and impairments throughout her life due to childhood polio and an accident on a Mexico City bus at the age of eighteen, is wounded by leafy thorns and spurts blood onto her dress. Her left foot, which was amputated at the end of her life in the 1950s, is pictured bandaged and also bleeding. Roots that sprout from Kahlo’s body and connect it to nature, a crown of flowers and thorns on her head, and the thorny site of her seemingly self-inflicted scars evoke imagery of Aztec sacrifice and healing rituals, as well as Christian martyrdom, influences characteristic of Kahlo’s oeuvres. The title of the painting appears on a flowing ribbon within the composition, reminiscent of Mexican retablos, devotional images of creolized Mexican-Indian/Catholic saints performing healing rituals that were painted on wood panels and were quite popular in modern Mexican religious and vernacular culture.
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Notes
Hayden Herrera, Frida Kahlo: The Paintings (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1991).
Anne Finger, “Helen and Frida,” in The Disability Studies Reader, ed. Leonard J. Davis, 401–7 (New York: Routledge, 1997), 403.
Major Disability Studies volumes of multidisciplinary critical analysis, personal essays, and poetry include, yet are not limited to the following: Lennard J. Davis, ed., The Disability Studies Reader (New York: Routledge, 1997);
David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder, eds., The Body and Physical Difference: Discourses of Disability (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997);
Mairian Corker and Sally French, eds., Disability Discourse (Buckingham UK and Philadelphia, PA: Open University Press, 1999);
Susan Crutchfield and Marcy Epstein, eds., Points of Contact: Disability, Art, and Culture (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000);
Helen Deutsch and Felicity Nussbaum, eds., “Defects”: Engendering the Modern Body (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, c. 2000);
Paul K. Longmore and Lauri Umansky, eds., The New Disability History: American Perspectives (New York: New York University Press, 2001);
Mairian Corker and Tom Shakespeare, eds., Disability/Postmodernity: Embodying Disability Theory (London and New York: Continuum, 2002);
And Sharon L. Snyder, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, and Brenda Jo Brueggemann, Disability Studies: Enabling the Humanities (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2002).
For a thorough explanation of medical models and their social and political implications, see Simi Linton, Claiming Disability: Knowledge and Identity, foreword by Michael Bérubé (New York and London: New York University Press, 1998).
Lennard J. Davis, Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body (London and New York: Verso, 1995).
See, for examples Alan Gartner and Tom Joe, eds., Images of the Disabled/Disabling Images (New York: Praeger, 1987);
Martin F. Norden, The Cinema of Isolation: A History of Physical Disability in the Movies (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, c. 1994);
David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder, Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, c. 2000);
And Paul K. Longmore, “Screening Stereotypes: Images of Disabled People in Television and Motion Pictures,” in Why I Burned My Book and Other Essays on Disability, 131–46 (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2003).
Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997).
Lynda Nead, The Female Nude: Art, Obscenity, and Sexuality (London and New York: Routledge, 1992).
Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, “Seeing the Disabled: Visual Rhetorics of Disability in Popular Photography” in The New Disability History: American Perspectives, ed. Paul K. Longmore and Lauri Umansky (New York: New York University Press, 2001), 335–74.
David Hevey, The Creatures that Time Forgot (London and New York: Routledge, 1992).
Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, “Staring Back: Self-Representations of Disabled Performance Artists,” American Quarterly 52, no. 2 (July 2000): 334–38;
“Dares to Stares: Disabled Women Performance Artists & the Dynamics of Staring,” in Bodies in Commotion: Disability and Performance, ed. Carrie Sandahl and Philip Auslander (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005), 30–41.
Petra Kuppers. Disability and Contemporary Performance: Bodies on Edge (New York and London: Routledge) 2003.
Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (London: Routledge, 1993). Phelan’s argument is rooted in Lacanian psychoanalysis regarding the primacy of the gaze in formation of identity and social structures of meaning. Underscoring that Lacan proposed the gaze as necessarily social, Phelan explains the codependent dynamics of the gaze, in which one looks at the “other” in order to define the self. The desire to gaze at the “other,” Phelan argues, results from the failure to see oneself. For Phelan, Lacan’s mirror stage, in which the subject sees itself only as an illusion, serves as a metaphor for how visual images always fail to account for the whole of subjectivity and always reflect more about the desires of the producer and viewer of the images than the body on display.
Henry M. Sayre, The Object of Performance: The American Avant-Garde since 1970 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1989).
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© 2010 Ann Millett-Gallant
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Millett-Gallant, A. (2010). Introduction: Enabling the Image. In: The Disabled Body in Contemporary Art. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230109971_1
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