Dr.

Tina Kinsella, National College of Art and Design, Dublin

Maternal Taboos and the Feminine Real:
The Artwork of Frida Kahlo and the Matrixial Theory of Bracha L. Ettinger



Introduction


This paper considers four of Frida Kahlos artworks Henry Ford Hospital (1932), The
Abortion (1932), My Birth (1932) and My Nurse and I (1937) which address the embodied
realities of feminine maternal subjectivity: miscarriage, birth, childbirth, child loss and
lactation. Investigations into the maternal body are tricky, thorny even, because any
discussion of the feminine subject that references the body is potentially contentious within
contemporary discourse. In The Aftermath of Feminism: Gender, Culture and Social Change
(2009), Angela McRobbie, observes that there is both an apathy and an antagonism in
contemporary feminist discourse which manifests itself as a reluctance to address the realities
of embodied sexual difference for fear of a return to essentialism. This has meant, as Griselda
Pollock notes, that in the current climate, even daring to speak of the feminine usually
causes anxiety or outright condemnation ... What do you mean by the feminine, I am often
asked. Is it not reductive, essentialist, Freudian, dangerous?
1
Pollock suggests that this is
because the direction of cerebral, feminist thought has been against the claim of bodies and
corpo-realized being and perceived essentialism of any kind that uses as a referent woman
as a being, a body or a social identity, is deemed to be the worst transgression.
2
Hence this
question, what do you mean by the feminine? is as good a place as any to begin this
presentation which aims to explore maternal taboos and the feminine Real in the work of
Frida Kahlo and the Matrixial theory of artist, philosopher and psychoanalytic theorist,
Bracha L. Ettinger.


The Matrixial Subject and the Feminine Corpo-Real


The feminine that is alluded to in this presentation is the concept of the feminine corpo-Real
proposed in Ettingers Matrixial theory. According to Ettinger, within psychoanalytic
literature, and in culture more generally, there has been a repetitive deletion of our enigmatic
emergence into life which has placed such emergence beyond the scope of thought and this
has resulted in an inability to explore an expanded hermeneutics of the Symbolic and
Imaginary that would be inclusive of the affectivity of the feminine corpo-Real. Ettinger
makes a radical intervention in the thought of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan who only
conceived of the subject posterior to birth. Before birth and in early natality, the mother and
infant can only be conceived as fused: a symbiotic unity where there is no differentiation
between subject and object. In the Freudian-Lacanian models of the subject, subjectivisation
processes commence exclusively after birth in the intersubjective encounter between mother
and child. That is, mother and child are to be considered as discrete, individual subjectivities
once the child has split/castrated from the mother (Freud) and entered into the signifying
chain of language (Lacan). For both Freud and Lacan a screen of originary repression shrouds
the primal scene, the trauma originel of birth, being foreclosed behind the screen of originary
repression, cannot contribute to subjectivisation. Indeed the primal scene is so absolutely
Dr. Tina Kinsella, National College of Art and Design, Dublin

foreclosed that nothing of it can be thought, symbolised or represented and this has led
Pollock to observe that:

One of the great paradoxes that we inherit from the very sphere of theory
and practice that promises us tools, ideas and concepts for feminist thinking
about subjectivity and sexual difference psychoanalysis is the linking
of that which gives life (the maternal feminine) with death. The mother is
sacrificed to the begetting of the phallic order the giver of life is
represented by a phallic Symbolic as a variously idealised lost object or
abjected as a physical hole, bodily place, an alluring and suffocating
entombment which does not contribute other than through its negation or
abjection, to the constitution of human subjectivity [] There are many
ways in which the maternal-feminine is linked with death and/or thereby
murdered. The most obvious is the early Lacanian model in which
Woman/Other/thing are joined in their shared relegation to the unsignifiable
zone of the Real
3


Ettinger argues that the emergence into life takes place in the late intrauterine encounter and
she suggests that the event of birth is not only a trauma foreclosed in an immemorial Real,
but rather an affective and subjectivising encounter-event in the feminine corpo-Real. Contra
Freud and Lacan, Ettinger proposes that primary subjectivisation processes commence prior
to birth in the late intrauterine corpo-Real encounter and proceeds via a cross-inscription of
aesthetic affects which are subjectivising. Ettinger argues that the model of the subject
proposed by Freud and Lacan is a phallic model that privileges the male body, the male
subject and male narcissism. The feminine Real that Ettinger articulates can stage its presence
in the artwork as, according to her, art can bypass the screen of originary repression. The
psychoanalytic foreclosure on the primal event protects male narcissism The price to be paid
for this if you are a female artist, Ettinger argues, is very high when your sexuality fits badly
into the Oedipal father-son circulation because in this Oedipal economy the female, and
female narcissism, can only be constituted as sacrifice.
4
Ironic, then, that the issue of
narcissism should raise its head when discussing this female artist, Frida Kahlo, who is
considered as a female narcissist par excellence.


Frida Kahlo: Maternal Taboos and the Feminine Real


No doubt, the artist, Frida Kahlo, is a modern icon. However, almost exclusively, her artistic
oeuvre is scrutinised, evaluated and interpreted through the prism of the most dramatic
aspects of her life and the drama of her personal appearance: the polio she contracted as a
child, the tramcar accident she was involved in at the age of eighteen which permanently
affected her health, leaving her with spinal cord injuries and fractures to her pelvic bone
her marriage to the Mexican muralist, Diego Rivera, su marido infiel, her colourful
appearance and costume, her bisexuality, her early death and her childlessness. It seems
impossible, therefore, to consider the work of Kahlo the artist, without considering the
implications of her being, first and foremost, a woman.
Undoubtedly, Kahlo drew inspiration from her life in her artwork. However, such speculative
hermeneutics which concentrate on biographical details risk reifying her life and image at the
expense of a serious re-evaluation of her art. On the one hand, we have an insistence that
Kahlos artwork testifies to an unruly narcissism and, on the other hand, there is an unabated
prurient interest in the trials and tribulations of her life. The repeated conflation of Kahlo the
Dr. Tina Kinsella, National College of Art and Design, Dublin

woman and Kahlo the artist, situates her as the only kind of interesting female artist: the artist
who is the feminine victim par excellence because, within the art history canon, woman is the
muse that inspires great art, not the subject who creates great artwork. Generations of artists
have appropriated the semiotics and sign of woman and this has lead Pollock, to observe that
the invisible sexual specificity of the female body has a long metaphorical history in western
thought, both fascinating and horrifying it.
5
This re-constructed phantasmatic feminine
fetishised by being either idealised or horrified is the concept of the feminine that has
often been historically re-iterated in western philosophical thought and culturally
immortalised in western arts. Woman is an art object, not a painting subject. So within the
Western canon, the female artist is situated as an aberration and most especially so when her
creative imaginings do not conform to models of stereotypical femininity.

This conflation of Kahlo the woman and Kahlo the artist also obfuscates the radical
iconoclasticism of her iconographic inventory due to a failure to attend to the subversive
performativity and theatricality at play in her work. In this presentation I suggest that Kahlo
addresses the supposed paucity and perversity of the female artists output by queering the
pitch of the portrayal of feminine subjectivity that was laid down over generations. Kahlos
work can be approached or, at least a way to approach some of her work, is as a performative
re-inscription of the maternal body that situates the maternal body not only as a site of
idealised procreation, but rather as a site where marked, abject, feminine and maternal taboos
are iconographically re-deployed as emblematic of her artistic creativity. This paper proposes
that Kahlos artistic practice is a radical aesthetic practice that performatively investigates the
trauma of pregnancy, childbirth and child loss. Kahlos work is evaluated as an artistic
exploration of the immemorial, yet affective and subjectivising, encounter-events in/of the
feminine corpo-Real. The works discussed here Henry Ford Hospital, The Abortion, My
Birth and My Nurse and I clearly reference Kahlos own experience of abortion and
miscarriage, as well as representing the embodied realities of breastfeeding and the bloodied
act of childbirth itself. Thus Kahlos work can be legitimately appraised as iterative re-
inscriptions of the semiotics and iconographies that shroud the socio-cultural taboos of
pregnancy, motherhood, childbirth and child loss (whether through chance or choice). In
these works aspects of embodied female maternal subjectivity uterine blood, abortion,
miscarriage, lactation that have been culturally aligned on the side of the indescribable,
unrepresentable, unsymbolisable feminine Real are taken as markers of feminine corpo-
reality and Kahlo performatively re-inscribes them, opening such maternal taboos onto a
poetic aesthetics of the feminine Real.

It is documented that in 1930 Kahlo had an abortion, probably because the foetus was sitting
incorrectly in her pelvis (which had been fractured in three places during the tram accident
she had been involved in five years before). In 1932, whilst staying in Detroit with her
husband, Diego, the 25 year old Kahlo found herself pregnant once again. In a letter to
Doctor Leo Eloesser, marked Detroit May 26
th
1932, Kahlo writes:

... The important question and what I want to consult you about before
anyone is that Im two months pregnant.

... I thought that, given the state of my health, it was better to abort. I told
him [Dr. Pratt who was attending to her in Detroit] so, and he gave me a
dose of quinine and a very strong castor oil purge. The day after taking it I
had a very slight haemorrhage, almost nothing. For five or six days I have
had a bit of bleeding, but very little. In any case I thought I had aborted and
went to see Doctor Pratt again. He examined me and told me no, that he is
Dr. Tina Kinsella, National College of Art and Design, Dublin

completely sure that I didnt abort and this his opinion was that it would be
much better, instead of having an abortion, to leave the baby alone and in
spite of the poor state of my organism, taking into account the small fracture
in the pelvis, spine, et cetera, et cetera, I could have a child by Caesarian
section without too much difficulty.


Two months later, Kahlo writes to Dr. Eloesser once again from Detroit. The letter is dated
July 29
th
1932:

... about two weeks before the 4
th
July I began to notice a sort of putrefied
bleeding almost daily. I was alarmed and went to see Dr Pratt and he told
me everything was normal and that he thought I could have the child very
well with a Caesarian section. I continued until the 4
th
of July, when without
knowing why, I aborted in the blinking of an eye. The fetus had not formed,
because it came out disintegrated even though I was three and a half months
pregnant

Five days after her miscarriage Kahlo drew this work, Self Portrait 9 July 1932. In it we see
the artist with a puffy face, a hair net and possibly a hospital gown. What is interesting about
this piece, is that we are not presented with the mask-like fact of the Frida usually portrayed
in Kahlos artistic works. One day later, on the 10
th
July 1932, Kahlo executed this work:
Henry Ford Hospital Drawing. It is perhaps of note, that in this work we no longer have the
human vulnerability expressed in the drawing of the day before, but rather there is a
movement from a more direct representation of self through portraiture to an expressionless
face, seemingly voided of emotion. As we will see, many of the iconographic devices
deployed by Kahlo in the painting she subsequently executed, Henry Ford Hospital, are
present in the drawing: the representations of her pelvis and spinal column, the snail, a
mechanical device of some kind and an orchid. In both drawing and painting her hand is
placed over her belly which is still slightly swollen from the recent pregnancy and in both
drawing and painting various symbols/representations are attached to the figure of the artist
through streamers that are reminiscent of ribboning arterial/umbilical cords (a recurring
feature in other works by Kahlo).

However, if we compare the drawing to the painting that followed, we see some marked
changes. The anatomical model of the female torso depicting the spine and an image of the
female pelvis is still there, as is the snail (which, according to Kahlo, was indicative of the
slowness of her miscarriage. It is of note that the snail reappears in later paintings by Kahlo,
the Diego and Frida 1929-1944, painted in 1944 and Moses or Nucleus of Creation, painted
in 1945, where the snail is deployed (as a symbol of sexuality and vitality, as the protective
housing of the shell led indigenous Indian peoples to see the snail as emblematic of
conception, pregnancy and childbirth), a mechanical instrument (which seals gas or
compressed air tanks to regulate air pressure within possibly conceived by Frida as a
symbolic indication that this piece of apparatus corresponds with the fallibility of her own
pelvic muscles and the orchid (a purple orchid was given to Kahlo by Rivera when she
was in hospital and was symbolic, to her, of sexuality and emotions). What appears to be
added to these symbols attached to Kahlo is an oversized male foetus (perhaps referring to
the loss of her little Dieguito little Diego). Other difference of note between the drawing
and the painting of the Henry Ford Hospital, is the scale of Frida on the bed. In the painting
she is more fragile, smaller. The hospital bed is now placed within the barren landscape with
industrial Detroit as a backdrop and the bed is now stained with uterine blood, upon which
Dr. Tina Kinsella, National College of Art and Design, Dublin

Kahlo lies, her mask-life face impassive, yet weeping copious tears. The image of the foetus
in Kahlos drawing, The Abortion, echoes that of the image in the painting of the Henry Ford
Hospital, painted in the same year. This drawing is a symphony of dualisms. On the left hand
side of the work we have the lost child and images of ovular cells that Kahlo copied from
scientific illustrations. An umbilical cord encircles her leg. On the other side we have
bloodied droplets seeping down the artists leg and pooling on the earth, blood which is in
turn fertilising the earth. We also have a third arm extending from the artists body, an arm
which holds a heart shaped artists palette. Above the heart shaped palette is an image of the
moon, reminding us of the lunar cycles that regulate female menstruation. The moon, like
Frida, is weeping. Yet the weeping vaginal blood continues to fertilise the earth. Little dots
are dispersed and permeate the left hand side of the drawing and these are almost exclusively
confined, on the right hand side of the painting, to the space between the Fridas arm and the
fertilised earth and they correspond precisely with the anatomical area of Kahlos body that
houses the reproductive and sexual organs. Thus the womb and the genitalia are placed
directly in the centre of the composition. Why the dualism and why the symphonic
symbologenic elements that seep and metamorphosise between these drawings and the
painting of the Henry Ford Hospital? Let us begin with the tears.

The tears reappear in this painting, My Birth, painted the same year Henry Ford Hospital.
Kahlos miscarriage occurred on July 4th 1932. Soon after she learned that her mother was
gravely ill. On 15
th
September 1932, Kahlos mother, Mathilde Calderon, died. In My Birth,
once again, we have the female genitalia placed in the centre of the composition. Again
feminine, maternal taboos are conveyed the actual blooded act of childbirth, female
genitalia as emblematic of maternal corporeality but also the sexuality of the maternal
feminine body. Once again we have the emission of vaginal/uterine blood. With reference to
this painting, Salmon Grimberg, a renowned respondent to the work of Kahlo remarks:

Mathilde is on her back with her knees spread and her upper torso wrapped
in a shroud; she is dead while giving birth. Except for Fridas head, her body
remains inside the birth canal. It is not clear whether Frida is dead or alive.
The room is abandoned. Above Mathildes head a weeping image of the
Virgin of the Sorrows, pierced by daggers and bleeding, appears to be
observing the scene through a window over the bed. In this painting, about
which Kahlo said later, This is how I imagined I was born, she implies
that her coming into the world was a kind of death to her mother, and
alludes to her inadequate attachment to her [Mathilde].
6


Grimbergs premise is founded upon the fact that Kahlo was conceived conceived shortly
after the death of her parents only son and from this fact Grimberg deduces that Frida came
into the world preceded by a dark cloud. Grimberg asserts that My Birth is considered as a
companion to another painting executed five years later by Kahlo, entitled My Nurse and I
and he observes:

The image of my Nurse and I looms brutally direct, and the spectator cannot
but react in horror at the sight: Kahlo, with the body of an infant and the
head of a woman, lies lifeless in the arms of the nanny.
7


Continuing, he notes that the painting conveys:

... not attachment but loss. There is no mutuality, no affectionate cuddling,
holding, touching, or eye contact. Frida does not respond to the nannys
Dr. Tina Kinsella, National College of Art and Design, Dublin

engorged left breast, which, transparent, reveals swollen milk ducts. Her lips
do not touch the nipple from which drops of milk spill into her mouth.
8


Using phrases such as faulty bonding, which laid the groundwork for the unstable structure
of her future life, Grimberg fails to see any representation of idealised maternality in Kahlos
pairing. He then asserts that Kahos subjectivity evidences a vulnerable, unbalanced woman
with a sense that she could not survive, resulting in the sacrifice of her true self to a mask.
Approaching Kahlos work in this manner, Grimberg aligns himself with a venerable strain of
the Western artistic canon that situates Kahlo as the saint of female victims. However, it is
also possible to approach these images as decidedly queer representations which subvert such
images of female victimhood or idealised maternality: representations that refuse to conform
to the stereotype of woman as either sexual object or as mother only. As such, Kahlos works
can be considered as a radical acknowledgement that woman is at once a masquerade a
performance of feminine tropes inscribed upon the female body but also a creatively
performative subversion of such tropes, whereby the feminine and maternal body may be re-
inscribed. Kahlo appropriates tropes literary, visual and cultural in both the painting
Henry Ford Hospital, the drawing el aborto , but also in other works, one of which My
Birth I discuss today. Specifically, she draws on hybrid Mexican feminine tropes, such as
La Llorona, La Chingada and La Malinche, all of which have particular significance with
regard to Mexican colonisation. Today I will concentrate solely on La Lorona. She is an
archetypal outsider evil woman. Within the Mexican cultural inheritance, La Llorona (the
weeping one) is unwed and has illegitimate children. Abandoned by her lover she is
representative of a deviant sexual energy and also of an aberrant maternal force as like
Medea the loss of her lover drives her to kill her own children in a frenzy of rage. In the
painting Henry Ford Hospital, Kahlo is weeping, her hair is messy and wild: she is an image
of abandonment. In these works, more generally, we have a re-appearing duo that appears as
a dualism, but which can also be considered as queer bedfellows: flooding uterine blood and
floods of tears. These binary of these apparent dualisms are impurified, as they seep into each
other by virtue of another specifically female fluid: the breast milk that stages its appearance
in My Nurse and I. The blood appears in the drawing, el aborto, in the stained beds of Henry
Ford Hospital and My Birth. Tears appear in both the drawing and both paintings. In My
Birth, they are the tears of the weeping Madonna, la mater dolorosa who, for the Mexican
peoples, serves as an image symbolising the point of departure from this life to the eternal life
that awaits the holy.

In a footnote, Grimberg notes that in a letter to Emmy Lou Packard, who was Riveras
assistant, Kahlo wrote that from the sky falls the milk of the virgin (p. 20). The milk of the
virgins falls like blood, like tears in abundance, in plenitude, to fertilise Mexican soil.
Kahlo takes these tropes of Mexican Catholic and pre-hispanic femininity the Earth
goddess, La Llorona, the weeping Madonna and synthesises them, then creatively
redeploying them to, I suggest, create Real-ised metaphors which stage a potential encounter
with the feminine Real. No doubt, there is a certain disassociation with the scene of primal
Encounter through the deployment of feminine tropes which create a distancing affect
but also a theatrical and performative re-booting of the primal scene. Perhaps with the intent
of working something through by re-appropriating what has already been appropriated the
maternal feminine body in order to initiate future potential becomings of the feminine
subject. Viewed from this perspective, it is possible to consider Kahlos works as deliberate
re-stagings of anti-nativity scenes in which experiences and encounters with the forces of life,
and death those forces aligned with the mortality of the maternal body are
performatively re-inscribed and Real-ised. Art, then, can be considered as a space/place of
Dr. Tina Kinsella, National College of Art and Design, Dublin

encounter where creativity is not only an act that confirms a sublimation of the Real of the
drives, but which may affectively bypass the screen of originary repression in order to stage
the potential of a Real-ised encounter with the feminine corpo-Real. In her letter to Dr.
Eloesser, written on 26
th
May, 1932, Kahlo also wrote:

... I never feel disappointed with life as in Russian novels. I perfectly
understand my situation and Im more or less happy, firstly, because I have
Diego, my mother and my father; I love them so much. I think thats enough
and I dont ask miracles of life, far from it.

The feminine maternal subject, as executed by Frida Kahlo, may not only set the scene of
primary narcissism, but re-stage a scene whereby artistic energy is not singularly
countenanced in terms of a deletion of and a repeated foreclosure on the feminine corpo-
Real. The Real, matrixially queered, can now be countenanced as the affective basis upon
which creativity, masculine and feminine, is. Real-ised. Thus re-setting and re-booting the
primal scene of trauma, a space/place in which trauma can be affectively accessed and
aesthetically processed.


1
Griselda Pollock, 2009.
2
Pollock, 2004.
3
Pollock, 2009.
4
Bracha L. Ettinger, 2006.
5
Griselda Pollock, 2004.
6
Salomon Grimberg, 2008.
7
Grimberg, 2008.
8
Ibid.

Works Cited



Ettinger, B. L., 2006, Weaving a Woman Artist with-in the Matrixial Encounter-Event in
Massumi, B. (ed.) The Matrixial Borderspace. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Grimberg, S., 2008, Frida Kahlo: Song of Herself. London and New York, Merrell.

McRobbie, A., 2009, The Aftermath of Feminism: Gender, Culture and Social Change
(2009). London: Sage.

Pollock, G., 2004, Thinking the Feminine: Aesthetic Practice as Introduction to Bracha
Ettinger and the Concepts of Matrix and Metramorphosis in Theory, Culture and Society
2004: 2;5.

Pollock, G. 2009, Mother Trouble: The Maternal Feminine in Phallic and Feminist Theory in
Relation to Bracha Ettingers Elaboration of of Matrixial Ethics/Aesthetics in Studies in the
Maternal 1 (1). [online]. Available at www.mamsie.bbk.ac.uk. Accessed 19 March 2011.