For What (?) Frida Kahlo's Worth

Abstract

A queer, disabled, communist female has become a celebrity of pop culture, although not celebrated for the intersectionality of those things. Rather, she is honored as a woman but stripped by a capitalist society that depoliticizes the fight she fought. The holistic narrative of Kahlo’s experience belongs as a coherent story – not as fragments of flirtation or failure. Her true narrative fights a good fight. The BarbieTM serves as a window into the senseless commodification and reproduction of Mexican culture in the United States has become deeply ingrained in our national culture and identity. Now, in 2018, Kahlo has a first class seat on the feminism bandwagon, while her native culture is trivialized and victim to a blatantly racist discourse driving a corrupt ideology. She is not a commodity of the US to exploit through artistic reproduction. In practice, Kahlo’s image is surviving in a capitalist society as a result of an economic system that she challenged; in theory, that same system is running its course on cultural source communities diminishing their narrative through cultural commodification and unruly reproduction. So in a culture where the word itself can hardly be defined, it is important to preserve the individuals and communities which comprise the world in which we live and learn and express ourselves. ]From concluding section]