Women's Studies 2158A/B Chapter Notes -Jacques Lacan, Miscarriage, Childbirth
28 Dec 2012
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Lecture 009 reading body languages: kahlo and medical imagery. Kahlo registers aspects of experience that social convention dictates ought to remain private and concealed. This provocative breach of the divide between public and private realms exposes the limits of what can be spoken within the hegemonic culture. For kahlo, her experience of a miscarriage would serve as a confirmation of the exclusion of the feminine from language that lacan talks about; attempts to rework and transform the patriarchal system of representations. Kahlo makes the viewer acknowledge gender and power relations inscribed in visual representations. Kahlo uses medical imagery in a disruptive way as a foreign intrusion that forces one to question the boundaries and exclusions enforced by art. Childbirth scenes rarely portrayed in western art and miscarriage never only in medical texts.
