Frida Kahlo’s Self-Fashioning in Art and Life: Making Trouble, Third Gender, Third Space

Since the 1970s, the artwork, biography and persona of the Mexican painter Frida Kahlo have enjoyed a meteoric rise in popularity such that she is frequently decontextualized even within scholarly interpretations. This paper revisits and challenges conventional interpretations of Kahlo’s use of costume in both her self-fashioning and her painting. The paper seeks to intervene in scholarship that resoundingly describes these acts, for example her donning of men’s clothing as a means to “defy” femininity, or her hyperfeminized interpretation of the clothing of indigenous women from Mexico’s Isthmus of Tehuantepec (Tehuanas), as a “feminist” invocation of an allegedly matriarchal culture, as a declaration of nationalist indigenism, as a strategy for appealing to her lovers, or as a mask and a frame behind which to hide her physical, and alleged emotional, disabilities. Drawing on insights developed within Queer/Quare Studies on gender nonconformity and “disidentification,” especially in the work of José Esteban Muñoz, E. Patrick Johnson and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, the concept of a “trialectics of spatiality” by political geographer Edward Soja, scholarship in the field of anthropology (historically and today) especially in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, and cultural studies on third sex/gender in traditional cultures, as well as art historical analysis, this paper reconsiders Kahlo’s costuming as a code through which she troubled rather than affirmed the nationalist, heteronormative patriarchy of Mexican post-revolutionary society and culture. Reading Kahlo’s use of costume in this way provides insight into a potentially intersectional understanding on her part of gender/sexual identity, as well as race and class.