Frida Kahlo and Eyegiene: Permutations of Subjectivity in the Televisual Age of Sex and Race

Original posting, May 2009...

As I move forward pulling together the final elements of my new manuscript, Eyegiene: Permutations of Subjectivity in the Televisual Age of Sex and Race, a follow-up volume to Tex[t]-Mex, I have decided to include a chapter on seeing in the work of Remedios Varo, Jorge Luis Borges, and Frida Kahlo--to be truthful, it is a revision and update of a conference paper I delivered 17 years ago, "Surreptitiously Watching the Voyeur’s Mirror: Fragmented Notes on Eye/I Addiction Culled From the Autobiographical Works of Jorge Luis Borges, Frida Kahlo, Jacques Derrida and Remedios Varo" for the Addiction and Culture Conference (Claremont Graduate School, Claremont, California, March 1996). A book was birthed out of that conference but I never got my act together in time to submit anything for it--check it out here. In any event, as a placemarker, I wanted to share the plates from The Diary of Frida Kahlo: An Intimate Self-Portrait that will provide the focus of my chapter--the uncanny, funny, and dynamic "ojosaurus" sketches:
I will try to come back later and sketch out my own thoughts on this striking composition. You can peek inside the Kahlo diary here.

Cool Pynchon T-Shirt via Etsy.com

...i just bought the Borges refrigerator magnets and spied this cool shirt! Viva Pynchon--The Crying of Lot 49 and Woman on the Edge of Time (by Marge Piercy) are the two best Chicano/a novels ever written by non-Chicanos! Xicanosmosis City!

Apoplectic Bloggers, Apologetic, Barrister/Psychiatrist-guarded Chicana Grifters, Hannah Montana, and 15 Minutes of Infamy

I don't know why a blog that aspires to track the dodgy shenanigans of Latina/o stereotypes should turn its eye this way, but I can't seem to ignore the nefarious doings of one Priscilla Ceballos, a Tejana from Garland, Texas, who, in the sincere desire to score Hannah Montana tickets for her daughter, ghost-wrote an essay for her daughter wherein she alleged said daughter had lost her father in the Iraq war. While the blogosphere is busy tarring and feathering Señora Ceballos (nifty screengrab above), said tale becomes yet another odd Tex[t]-Mexual allegory--but this time the star at the center of the storm is a Tejana scribe, a sharp little cookie with a gift for fiction, who has written herself into a tale of woe.

You think I am exagerrating on the tar and feathering, taste a little of d-listed's screed.

The Today show feature on the escándalo is worth the price of your click if only for the shot of Ceballos flanked by her lawyer and a psychiatrist! Hijole, holy ghosts of Dombey and Son and Freud!

A good deal of Tex[t]-Mex meditates on the idea of the ersatz or "constructed," fabricated human; and from Ceballos's painted-on eyebrows and tattooed lipstick to Hannah Montana being the fabricated alter-ego of a character named Miley Stewart (played by the actress Miley Cyrus--daughter of Billy Ray "Achy Breaky Heart" Cyrus), we find ourselves awash, astray, adrift in oceans of simulacra, of delicious, well-crafted, media-fanned fakery, that Jorge Luis Borges schooled us on in "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" and Jean Baudrillard reminded us of with his "simulacra." It would be funny if Weapons of Mass Destruction, the Nazi scapegoating of Jews (and, did you know?, the flagellants 14nth century scapegoating of Jews*), and anti-immigrant bashing by neo-Klan pundits didn't work and thrive through the same logic.

There's more to write about here, but I have to think about it.... More to come.



*Lurid recreations of the same can be witnessed on the History Channel's Plague docudrama!

Essential updates from Hasta Los Gatos and Guanabee--gracias to 'Hasta for the links!