Barbie Frida Kahlo has a message for you

Text published in the journal Dièses on January 25, 2022.

In an article in Cámara cívica devoted to Mexican painter Frida Kahlo, Mercedes Serrato notes that history (sic) has obscured the artist's disability. To illustrate this, she quotes an excerpt from Mattel's description of the Frida doll:

Capitalism, inclined to absorb everything, has also launched itself into the market of the minoritized, which puts it in conflict with the dominant images and models.

With the Barbie Frida, Mattel seems to have resolved this tension by bringing the doll as close to Western beauty canons as possible. Barbie Frida has thus been slightly deracized: her eyes and her skin are lighter than those of the artist. The company also tried to bring the doll closer to the standardized ideal of femininity by erasing Frida Kahlo's supralabial down and mono-eyebrow, but they chose above all, in fact, not to make her handicap visible.

If a slight concession is made to the doll Hellen Keller, author and deafblind activist, belonging just like Frida Kahlo to the series "Inspiring Women" (she wears as an "accessory" a book whose title is "Braille"), nothing that can evoking Frida Kahlo's disability is only apparent for the doll that represents her.

What hypotheses can we concretely consider to explain the erasure of the handicap in the doll?

A standardized ideal of femininity

If a woman with a single eyebrow and thick hair defies the normalized ideal of femininity, a handicapped woman is simply excluded from the fields of seduction and femininity, as Rosemary Garland Thomson remarks in an article that deals with to the inclusion of disability within feminist theories.

Also, explains the American researcher, Becky, the wheelchair friend of Barbie launched on the market in 1997, wears comfortable clothes: pants with elastic waist, adapted shoes and wide shirts while the prototypical Barbie displays a femininity made of dresses sequins, crowns and constricting push-up bras.

Conceived and perceived as “the disabled friend”, Becky is not supposed to embody Barbie-like femininity, perhaps even femininity at all. The able-bodied children who buy Becky will always identify with Barbie, Becky having just a secondary role and even a precise function, namely making Barbie cool in the eyes of her public: Becky is Barbie's token ¹ .

The challenge for the brand with the Frida doll was, on the other hand, to include it in the role model function of Barbie dolls. However, a display of Frida's handicap in the body of the doll: a leg thinner, shorter than the other or even an accessory recalling her "deficiency", her lack, her illness, would have sent the doll back to an otherness making obstacle to any identification for a non-specific audience.

Discourses on the real character, including academic ones, seem to confirm that illness and disability conjure up perceptions in the imagination that run counter to beauty, sex appeal, seduction.

Thus, Hayden Herrera, in Frida, Biography of Frida Kahlo, a reference work on the artist, reports the words that Frida Kahlo's father would have addressed to Diego Rivera when the latter asked for his daughter's hand:

A validist imaginary

If we can not say that it is the disease (poliomyelitis or, according to some, spina bifida, which we would more readily qualify today as a handicap) which made Frida in the eyes of her father "not pretty" , on the other hand, it seems obvious that the handicap made her less bankable on the marriage market.

Alluding to the relationship of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, Hayden Herrera writes in turn:

Like Anton Hofmiller, the protagonist of The Dangerous Pity of S. Zweig, Diego Rivera is said to have suffered what Zweig called "pity poisoning", a pity that Frida Kahlo would have knowingly sought to arouse in her husband by multiplying useless operations.

Sick, disabled and ugly (perhaps we should say disabled, therefore ugly), the pity that she would have inspired in Diego Rivera seems to appear to many, including her biographer, as Frida Kahlo's only asset to keep her couple going. .

The validist imaginary ⁴ may thus have weighed in Mattel's choices and led them to erase all traces of disability in the doll. Concerning ethnic traits or signs of a femininity that does not conform to the dominant logics, Mattel plays on attenuation but the handicap is erased. Visible, it would be too disruptive, would create a break with what is expected of Barbie dolls in terms of beauty, sex appeal, femininity and would also be an obstacle to the identification projections of a lambda public.

But in addition, a disabled Frida doll would have hindered the deployment of the various social roles and facets of the painter that Mattel wanted to highlight: “artist, activist and feminist icon. Indeed, the handicap essentializes, prevents from considering the individual in his multiple dimensions and as being capable of agency.

Confirming this perspective, Hayden Herrera writes in the aforementioned work:

Herrera's assertion is based on a binary invalidity/validity scheme, which associates validity with capacity, or even the ability to act, and invalidity with incapacity. Thus, according to Herrera, if Frida performs validity, in other words, if she is not in the passive role that is expected of a disabled person, it is because she should not be so disabled as that: Frida Kahlo would have overplayed her handicap.

An example of inspirational porn

That she manages to translate her physical problems into art does not seem to give her the status of an artist in her own right. Frida's handicap may not be as "heavy" as she claims, but it is there, conditioning and even explaining her thematic choices:

Too much or not enough: this is a catchphrase well known to feminists, which takes on a particular color when it comes to a disabled woman. Assimilation or essentialization, these seem to be the only possible options.

In short, a Frida Kahlo doll that would have displayed a visible handicap would have made visible a handicapped person who paints rather than a handicapped painter.

Note, however, that if we examine closely and in full the presentation text of the Frida Kahlo doll, and in particular the lexicon that composes it, we realize that it belongs to a very particular notional field attached to the clichés on the disability:

Indeed, the strength, the perseverance, the obstacles overcome, the vital projects presented as dreams whose accomplishment becomes something extraordinary, even heroic, that is the rhetoric specific to inspirational porn.

Inspiration porn, or inspirational porn, is a formula used for the first time by an Australian disabled activist, Stella Young, in an editorial in the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's webzine Ramp Up to denounce, on the one hand, the idea that disabled people who perform ordinary activities should be considered extraordinary because of their disability and, on the other hand, the instrumentalization of these disabled people with the aim of making them a source of inspiration for the able-bodied majority .

Porn-inspirational narratives are also constructed from the validity/handicap binary scheme. This schema intersects with the theory of the tragedy or individual model of disability, set out by Mike Oliver ⁷ , a schema from the perspective of which the disabled person cannot fully participate in society because of his functional limitations. Also, the disabled person who excels in a field or who simply performs a social activity, the person who "overcomes" the disability, to use the terms of the porn inspiration, invariably switches to the exceptional, the extraordinary, the heroic.

The erasure of disabled identities

Here again, academic texts support this view. The following excerpt, taken from an article by Charles Gardou, is a perfect illustration of a narrative that fits into both tragedy theory and inspirational porn:

In this speech imbued with pathos, illness and disability are presented as a tragedy leading to a miserable condition, to a life of greyness. We also find elements of the language of inspirational porn: “drawing its strength from its vulnerability”, then qualities required in porn-inspirers: perseverance, overcoming, combative, even heroic character. These characteristics are materialized here in the features of the conquistadora ⁸ .

But let's come back to the Barbie Frida and to the article by Mercedes Serrato that we quoted in the introduction to this text. We note that, contrary to what this researcher asserted, the allusion to Frida Kahlo's handicap is indeed present in the description of the doll supposed to represent her. It is subtly evoked through a lexical choice that summons a clearly identifiable stereotype: that of the heroic handicapped woman who overcomes her miserable condition.

If, as we have seen, the visual erasure of any mark of deficiency in the object is essential to the identity projections of a non-specific public, its evocation is perhaps also so to respond to the horizon of public expectation of Frida Kahlo. Indeed, as Margaret Lindauer asserts ⁹ , the commercial potential of Frida Kahlo's work is associated with the "market value" of the tragic account of her life which, within the framework of an ableist reading grid, refers to his illness and disability. It is clear that this commercial vein seems to extend beyond the work.

Provided that we admit the existence of this ableist imaginary baggage weighing on Frida Kahlo, the challenge will then have been for Mattel to represent the counter-example of the stereotype of the disabled woman – a woman responding to the dominant canons of beauty and femininity. – without however making the economy of the very lucrative tragic account of a life fatally linked to the disease and the handicap.

Although sometimes contested, Frida Kahlo remains for many a feminist icon. As such, we are entitled to wonder to what extent feminists have made the artist's handicap visible. More broadly, it would be appropriate to question to what extent feminism, including intersectional, proceeded, like Mattel, to erase the “disabled” identity within its struggle ¹⁰ . We are entitled to ask ourselves, finally, if it is not partly because the feminist consciousness of oppression too often stops at the gates of ableism that effacements and essentializing discourses still take over, without finding too many resistance opposite, when it comes to talking about a disabled artist, a disabled woman.

Elena Chamorro is a member of the CLHEE (Collective Fight and Handicaps for Equality and Emancipation)