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. Biographies of the artist do not discuss her intimate relationships with women in the same detail as those with men; the harsh judgments apparent in accounts of her extramarital affairs with men are not attached to acknowledgments of her bisexuality. For example, Herrera notes that Rivera was not threatened by Kahlo’s relationships with women but was intolerant of those with other men. In the context of Mexican gender prescription, Kahlo’s sexual relationships with women, in and of themselves, would not necessarily have transgressed the boundaries of socially acceptable behavior. Emotional, even sexually intimate bonding between women is not in itself reprehensible and also is not what “lesbianism” refers to in the Latin American sexual system. As long as a woman remains feminine (passive) in sexual acts, she is not castigated as is a woman who actively, aggressively pursues male or female sexual “conquests.” As Almaguer explains, gendered-behavior, or “the act one wants to perform with another person” of either biological sex, is far more closely scrutinized in classifying sexual identities.102
The image placed here in the print version has been intentionally omitted
Figure 8. Two Nudes in a Forest, 1939. Oil on sheet metal, 9⅞″ × 11⅞″. © 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.
If considered as merely an expression of female intimacy, Two Nudes in a Forest does not compromise gender prescription. But racial differences depicted in the composition take the painting beyond the artist’s personal (sexual) life. As Moraga explains, female sexuality historically is associated with the “traitor” Malinche, whose betrayal was sexual/racial/national; because of her sexual relationship with Cortés, Malinche is charged with betraying the Indian race and indigenous nation. The development of the Malinche legend from the history of Malintzin establishes the supposed culpability of all women, particularly when they assert an opinion or position discordant to presumed social mores. In Moraga’s words, “The woman who defies her role as subservient to her husband, father, brother or son by taking control of her own sexual destiny is purported to be a ‘traitor to her race’ by contributing to the ‘genocide’ of her people.”103 Thus even though the painting does not depict gender transgression (neither woman appears sexually aggressive), it metaphorically indicates the supposed inherent duplicity of female sexuality through the depiction of intimacy between an Indian woman and a mestiza (Malinche and subsequent mestizo generations). Moraga explains, “even if the defiant woman is not a lesbian [aggressively pursuing sexual acts with women], she is purported to be one, . . . she is una Malinchista. Like the Malinche of Mexican history, she is corrupted by foreign influences which threaten to destroy her people.”104 This “corruption” takes on a particular social significance in postrevolutionary association between the nation and the family; “lesbianism, in any form . . . challenge[s] the very foundation of la familia.”105 Without the family, nationalism and patriarchy cannot propagate.
In Two Nudes in the Forest, the red shawl encircling the Indian woman’s head metaphorically represents the barrenness of the lesbian womb