Frida Kahlo Cyborg: a look at her life-work

Abstract

Due to the strong influence of coloniality of knowledge and the dominance of western Cartesian thought, Latin American thought has reproduced the dualisms surrounding the way in which we think about different dimensions of life: mind-body, nature-culture, natural-artificial. Nevertheless, alternatives that make the structure of dualistic thought tremble and that allow us to think about life from a different place have been proposed. It is in relation to the latter that we reflect about the life-work of Frida Kahlo, an artist who embodied and captured the conditions of  her time in her art: the Mexican
Revolution and the militancy of the Latin American left in which she participates, characterised by a strong patriotism. Additionally, she explores the diseases and ailments that she goes through, and the multiple surgeries and rehabilitation procedures she has to undergo, hence the disabled
body acquires a leading role in her works. The aim of this essay is to question how the artist plays with the representations of the body, taking Donna Haraway’s idea of the cyborg as a starting point.  Throughout her work, Frida is and represents bodies that escape hegemony, that transgress and
are formed in the ruptures of the binary oppositions of the colonial, patriarchal and western. In this way, Frida Kahlo’s life-work exhibits the microphysics of power as well, shedding light on the instability of the invented limits of technological reason as sovereign of the body and proposing new
ways of experiencing existence.