Introduction

In the spring of 2018, Mattel released a new collection of Barbies, titled the Inspiring Women Series. The goal of the collection seemed simple: in Mattel's words, the dolls were meant to "pay tribute to courageous women who paved the way for generations of girls to dream bigger than ever before." The face of the series became none other than Frida Kahlo – the painter who, throughout her lifetime, produced ambitious and intimate self-portraits while asserting her passions for and commitments to socialist politics and her native Mexican folk culture. Art historians widely agree that Kahlo was one of the most significant artists of the previous century; she is one of the few women artists that the general public can name without hesitation. It is no surprise, then, that Kahlo was an obvious candidate for this Barbie collection.

While Mattel can be lauded for its increasing recognition and celebration of a diverse body of creative women, the commodification of Kahlo-as-Barbie was nothing short of controversial. The doll was banned in Kahlo's native Mexico and publicly criticized by Salma Hayek, the actor who, sixteen years earlier, had starred in and spearheaded the production of the Kahlo biopic Frida, directed by Julie Taymor. This essay explores this reception and the ways in which the Frida Kahlo Barbie attempted to capitalize on Fridamania, a phenomenon that is driven by contradictory colonial and feminist forces. Fridamania began with the women's movement in the 1970s and continues today. While the increase in scholarly and public attention to the artist and her work is worthy of praise as part of a larger conversation about the necessity of serious and sustained study of women and the arts, Kahlo is unique among women artists in the way that her image has been endlessly commodified in recent decades, appearing on clothing and housewares to office supplies and cosmetics. This essay thus examines the commodification of the artist and the story Mattel tells about Kahlo through the doll's body, packaging, and marketing.

Further, I illuminate how a crucial aspect of Kahlo's biography is silenced by Mattel – that of chronic pain and disability. Her body was forever impacted by childhood trauma: first, a bout with polio; second, a severe trolley accident. As a result, she was no stranger to chronic pain and surgeries, and her survival and persistence are noted in many of the biographies of the artist written for the same young demographic Barbie appeals to. I consider, then, Mattel's erasure of the artist’s disability, and I reveal how and why critics of Mattel have fixated on the doll’s inability to accurately represent Kahlo’s disability.

Frida Kahlo, Inspiring Woman

To understand the story and consequences of Fridamania, as well as the factors that determined the artist's classification as an "Inspiring Woman," we must examine the contexts in which Frida Kahlo lived and worked. Born in 1907 in Coyoacán, a Mexico City borough, she turned to painting as a teenager to cope with chronic pain. Kahlo's medical history was complicated even as a child: she likely suffered from poliomyelitis, which caused "atrophy to the right leg with light shortening and leaning to right of foot" (Grimberg 115). This damage did not stop the young girl from living a rambunctious and active life; however, her energy and activity would be hindered by the 1925 trolley accident that would permanently hinder her mobility and ability to bear children. The following description from Kahlo's medical history, collected by obstetrician-gynecologist Dr. Henriette Begun in 1946 is difficult to read; however, it lists in the most straightforward manner possible the extent of the bodily trauma caused by this accident:

Accident causing fracture of lumbar vertebrae 3 and 4; three pelvic fractures; 11 (?) [fractures] of right foot; dislocation of left elbow joint; penetrating wound by steel bar entering through left hip and exiting through vagina, tearing left labia; acute peritonitis; cystitis with canalization for several days. Bedridden in Red Cross Hospital for three months. Fracture of [spinal] column goes unnoticed by physicians until she is cared for by Dr. Ortiz Tirado, who orders immobilization with plaster corset for nine months. Three or four months after wearing corset, patient suddenly feels whole right side to be "asleep" for an hour or longer. Phenomenon diminished with shots and massage, and does not return. When plaster corset is removed, she initiates "normal" life, but has "continuous sense of tiredness," and pain in the spine and right leg. (Grimberg 115-116)

Kahlo would continue to undergo painful operations before her death at age forty-seven in 1954. Additionally, she would experience miscarriages, deafness, exhaustion, and depression, among other ailments.

As Kahlo's primary genre, self-portraiture became a means of grappling with her trauma and experiences with chronic pain. Some of these works, such as Henry Ford Hospital (1932), would be shockingly graphic for the time in the way that she renders her body and its failures to operate according to social expectations for women, including carrying a pregnancy to term. But it was not just from physical pain that Kahlo would suffer. Her famous marriage to muralist Diego Rivera was nothing shy of tempestuous, and her art served as an outlet to explore mental anguish and feelings of rejection. The couple married, had extramarital affairs – including an especially painful one between Diego and Kahlo's sister Cristina – separated, and remarried from 1929 to the end of Kahlo's life. Despite their dysfunction and issues with marital fidelity, the pair of artists found inspiration in each other. Both would be recognized as two of the most important artists of the twentieth century; Kahlo is especially notable for not being permanently relegated to the position of Rivera's amateur-painter wife, as in the case of some artist unions.

Underpinning these other key components of Kahlo's identity and relationships are her Marxist politics and adoption of indigenous dress, the latter of which Mattel capitalized on in the costuming of their doll. Kahlo joined the Mexican Communist Party in the late 1920s, and she became the lover and devotee of Leon Trotsky, the Russian revolutionary who was granted political asylum in Mexico in 1936. In the years following the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920), Kahlo became a devoted participant in Mexicanidad, a complicated aspect of her legacy that deserves increased attention. Mexicanidad is less "a struggle for mainstream political power" as it is "a proto-nationalistic 'indianist' movement or subculture" (Rostas 20). The cultivation of Mexican nationalism lay in the government's "exalt[ation of] contemporary manifestations of Mexico's pre-Hispanic past while simultaneously directing attention to the rich diversity inherent in Mexican culture" (Block and Hoffman-Jeep 8). Kahlo herself became famous for her indigenismo, or her celebration, performance, and appropriation of a pre-colonial, indigenous culture. In a charitable reading by Rebecca Block and Lynda Hoffman-Jeep, "Frida Kahlo fashioned her own interpretation of revolutionary ideology from remnants of Mexico's indigenous past and ethically diverse contemporary scene, situating herself, and therefore her Mexican revolutionary ideals, in a broad international setting for the world to see and ponder" (Block and Hoffman-Jeep 11-12). But Kahlo's appropriation of traditional Tehuana dress – not unlike the one worn by the Barbie – has come increasingly under fire in recent years, as critics take a hard look at Kahlo's fetishization of indigenous culture in the years following her marriage to Rivera.

Kahlo herself had little personal ties to the indigenous Zapotec culture of the Tehuantepec region: her father Guillermo was German and Jewish, while her mother Matilde was of Spanish and indigenous (but of Purépechan, rather than Zapotec) descent. As Joanna Garcia Cheran defines the movement, Mexicanidad was at the cost of the indigenous populations whose culture fueled the movement and its aesthetics, while its people were expected to assimilate while being "denied an active role in the conception and execution of this new ideology" (Cheran). Kahlo made indigeneity a key part of her brand, but at what cost?

My mention of Frida Kahlo's indigenismo exists, here, as a call for more inclusive conversations about Kahlo's racial politics and Mexican cultural ideology, but within the scope of this Barbie-centric essay, it serves as an important context for the way her doll is costumed. While the remainder of this essay will take a step back to analyze Fridamania as a wider phenomenon and Mattel's material censorship of Kahlo's disabilities, I do encourage readers to listen carefully to indigenous people's criticism of Kahlo and nuanced re-evaluation of her art, legacy, and subsequent commodification, which is certainly not the narrative that Mattel intended when they selected Kahlo for the Inspiring Women Series.

Mattel and the Politics of Fridamania

Mattel was not the first company to capitalize off Kahlo's image, and it certainly will not be the last. In the simplest of terms, Fridamania can be described as the "frenzied cult following reflected by the mass-market circulation of objects bearing Kahlo's image" (Lindauer 12). To clarify, Fridamania, also termed Fridolatry or Frida Fever, is not all negative: the phenomenon is a byproduct of feminist art history and has worked to position Kahlo as central to our understanding of both self-portraiture and twentieth-century art more broadly. This movement has ensured that Kahlo is usually the sole woman artist that the general public can name without hesitation. Nevertheless, we must think critically and carefully about Fridamania's tensions and what it takes for granted.

At its core, however, Fridolatry simultaneously fuels and is fueled by consumption and commodification, forces closely intertwined with colonialism. Frida Kahlo was a staunch anti-capitalist, and many critics of Fridamania have argued that, through the act of commodification, Kahlo "is routinely stripped down to a subdued, able-bodied, feminized, and whitened ideal of feminism for mass consumption that stands in direct opposition to both her life and artistic endeavors" (Albarrán 635). Further, Fridamania, "venerates the artist, thereby appearing to represent an intimate relationship between 'worshipper' (consumer) and 'heroine' or 'icon' (product)" (Lindauer 178). This assessment of the cult fetishization of Frida Kahlo in the 1990s begs an interesting question in the case of Mattel: what changes should be made to the doll when the intended worshippers are less educated children? This question is not just for child consumers: well-meaning adults, too, often fall into the trap of thinking they know more about the artist than they actually do. What is worse is that "the little the general public does know about Kahlo is often incorrect," creating a vicious cycle of "unchecked adulation" (Pankl and Blake 3, 4).

Mattel's marketing of Kahlo and what makes her an Inspiring Woman is not blatantly incorrect; the marketing for the doll, however, is so vague, so oversimplified that it is easy to see where consumers could be led astray in their perceptions of who Kahlo was. Mattel's version of Kahlo, as narrativized on the back of the Barbie's packaging, is a woman who "over[came] a number of obstacles to follow her dream of becoming a fine artist," a painter who "persevered and gained recognition for her unique style and perspective." And Kahlo, indeed, "addressed important topics like identity, class, and race, making her voice, and the voices of girls and women alike, heard." But such generalizations teach the consumer nothing about who Kahlo was at her core, what she stood for, and what exactly it was that made her a feminist icon, much less an artist with a complex relationship with her native Mexico.

Before discussing the complicated public reception of the artist Barbie, some context is necessary regarding the legal battle between the Kahlo family and the corporation that owned rights to her likeness and the permission granted to Mattel to produce the doll in the first place. Mattel's missteps in the Barbie-fication of the artist might have felt personal to Salma Hayek – which I soon discuss – but they were even more so for the Kahlo family. Following Kahlo's death, her niece, Isolda Pinedo Kahlo, inherited the artist's property rights, including her name and likeness for fifty years. In 2004, Mara Cristina Romeo Pinedo, Isolda's daughter, took control as power of attorney over her mother's affairs. At this juncture, the rights become even more complicated, as her heirs had to register "Frida Kahlo" as a trademark and form the Frida Kahlo Corporation "with the mission to educate, share, and preserve Frida Kahlo's art, image, and legacy through the worldwide commercialization and licensing of the Frida Kahlo brand."¹ The execution of this mission would not be simple, especially when the family came to disagree with the corporation's approach to merchandising.

In interviews conducted by Emily Green for NPR News, Beatriz Alvarado, spokeswoman for the Frida Kahlo Corporation, celebrated the doll's launch in 2018, as the "idea is to bring Frida to new generations that [are] just six to ten years old” and that the “doll will ensure that her story lives on” (Green). On the one hand, the corporation's project is laudable: the sooner young people are introduced to women artists and thus have burst open for them the art historical canon, the better. Yet, on the other hand, this project is undermined when the version of the artist that is presented is dubiously authentic. It is presumptuous on the Frida Kahlo Corporation's part to assume that vinyl-faced dolls will make or break the continuation of Kahlo's legacy, as it ignores the painstaking work of art historians, educators, and curators who have worked tirelessly to organize exhibitions and write about Kahlo for public-facing audiences inclusive of both adults and children. 

Ultimately, the Kahlo family did not agree with how Kahlo was represented in the Inspiring Woman Series, and they went as far as to take the Frida Kahlo Corporation (FKC) to court over the matter. The family's relationship with FKC had begun to deteriorate seven years earlier, regarding whether or not the family transferred rights to Kahlo’s name and image in full (Albarrán 636-637). In any case, the family was not pleased with the Kahlo Barbie; Mara Romeo, Kahlo's grand-niece, was vocal in her objection to the whitewashing of Kahlo's complexion, the lightening of her eyes, and the doll's slim figure. In April 2018, the Kahlo family won a temporary injunction that prevented the sale of the Kahlo Barbies in Mexico, though this did not impact sales in the United States and other countries. There was, unsurprisingly, a countersuit in which FKC claimed defamation and the illegal usage of Kahlo's likeness, though the case has since been closed.

Even though the doll was only banned in Mexico, the Frida Kahlo Barbie faced backlash on an international scale, which is not to say that the Barbie had no fans. For some, any representation of Latinx women was better than nothing, and Kahlo was truly inspiring as a folk and surrealist luminary who interrogated gender, trauma, and embodiment in her work, especially in the domain of self-portraiture. Regardless, the broad reporting and op-eds published circa the doll's release serve as important artifacts for rhetorical analysis that testifies to the public's largely negative reactions to Mattel's revisions of Kahlo's truths for public consumption and to ensure closer alignment within Barbie's iconic brand. In a 2016 article on Mattel's Project Dawn – the code name for an experimental line of Barbies with curvy, petite, and tall body types – Eliana Dockterman articulates the problem with Barbie in ways that predict the problem with the Kahlo doll. "As much as Mattel has tried to market her as a feminist," Dockterman argues, "Barbie's famous figure has always overshadowed her business outfits. At her core, she's just a body, not a character, a canvas upon which society can project its anxieties about body image" (48). A major throughline of the following texts is how the doll's quintessential Barbie figure overshadows what made Kahlo so unique as a radical artist who harnessed her creativity as a means of healing and self-expression in moments of intense personal and political pain. The Frida Kahlo Barbie may be Mattel's canvas, but it lacks the authenticity and introspection that Kahlo so generously provided us across a body of approximately two hundred paintings. In doing so, the doll fails to inspire, instead creating just another vehicle for young girls to contend with harmful and perhaps antiquated beauty standards.

Aside from living members of the Kahlo family, there is perhaps no person, much less a celebrity, as closely intertwined with the artist in the public's eyes as Salma Hayek. Frida (2002), the Julie Taymor-directed biopic, starring Hayek as the artist, may have been imperfect in its own renderings of Kahlo's disability, but the trolley accident and brutality of her subsequent recovery and later miscarriage are, indeed, present. Nevertheless, after serving as a catalyst for the film's production and intimately embodying a version of its subject, the public looked to Hayek for a definitive statement. Mattel, she would argue, took too many creative liberties in their revision and redaction of Kahlo's most unique features in order to better align the artist with the idealized beauty standards Barbie enthusiasts and collectors had come to expect from the doll. Utilizing a platform that could reach millions of followers with the press of a button, in a since-deleted Instagram post Hayek took a public stand against Mattel, writing “#FridaKahlo never tried to be or look like anyone else. She celebrated her uniqueness. How could they turn her into a Barbie” (@salmahayek). In Vogue’s treatment of Hayek’s stakes in the debate, Lauren Valenti calls attention to the fact that not only was Hayek Frida Kahlo in the eyes of many who had only seen the film and not any of Kahlo’s artworks for themselves, but she was also the mother to a ten-year-old daughter:

Adding her rebuke to the discourse [Hayek] brings new attention to the project’s inherent flaw. Mattel designed its series to inspire women and young girls, only to wipe away Kahlo’s defining features… By calling the company’s missteps to light, and asking society to examine the values that inform our notions of attractiveness, Hayek sends a message to young girls everywhere to embrace what makes them different, challenge the status quo – and dream bigger.

Valenti’s article does make clear the broad impact such dolls have on young girls’ notions of beauty, strength, and body image; this crucial argument is not to go ignored.

The commodification of Kahlo’s image by American corporations speaks to the ironies of Kahlo’s image being co-opted for products, from nail polish and cosmetics to dolls and clothing, that are related, however indirectly, to the beauty industry and its celebration of Western (read white) ideals. Mattel’s Kahlo does possess, however faintly, the artist’s signature unibrow, but the doll’s face is idealized in the standard Barbie fashion. With Fridamania came a “Frida-look” that was replicated in fashion magazines and “exemplified by Kahloesque models (who[se] lack [of] facial hair) abides by the masculinist construct of the attractive woman who is defined by her alleged satisfaction in pleasing a masculine eye” (Lindauer 162). This is a pattern Mattel echoes as its Barbies continually reinscribe patriarchal, western values.

Further international coverage of the Barbie’s launch often repeats the same beats: Take, for example, the 9 March 2018 reporting in the London Evening Standard:

Kahlo's great-niece Mara de Anda Romeo said Mattel does not have the rights to use the artist's image. Pableo Sangri, a lawyer for Ms de Anda Romeo, said his client is not seeking money but wants Mattel to talk abour redesigning the doll. Critics have complained that the doll does not reflect Kahlo's heavy, nearly conjoined eyebrows, and they say its costume does not accurately portray the elaborate Tehuana-style dresses the artist wore. (De Peyer)

The criticism of the doll, here, is again framed as simply focusing on aesthetics, ignoring any conversations in the public sphere about the necessity of inclusivity and Barbie's depictions, or lack thereof, of disability (much less indigeneity). Frequently, the articulation of the doll's representation issues is hindered by their failure to name Mattel's inability to reckon with disability. Valenti's catalog of misdoings echoes Mara Romeo's and includes "her dark brown gaze lightened, her unibrow noticeably absent, and her body distinctly downsized." But if Mattel truly was going to "match what the artist really was," they would have to acknowledge the realities of Kahlo's body beyond her skin tone and slender physique. Additionally, the London Evening Standard's coverage ends with a note about ownership, stating "Mattel said it had permission for the doll from the Frida Kahlo Corporation, which owns her image rights" (De Peyer). But, as we know, the question of who owns the rights to Kahlo's images was far more complicated than this coverage insinuates, and the framing here, especially for readers taking this coverage at face value, seems to absolve Mattel from any wrongdoing.

Mattel & the (Lack of) Disability Representation

In one of the most articulate public-facing essays written about the Frida Kahlo Barbie at the time of its release, Aditi Natasha Kini summarized the commercialized bent of Fridamania as "there are two Fridas, and pop culture wants only one: the celebrity." Kini notes that "Mattel's version of Kaho sanitizes her body and her history into an easily digestible, able-bodied, pretty sameness. This is Frida the celebrity, but it's certainly not Frida the artist." "Able-bodied, pretty sameness" may be an appropriate historical summary for the toy line. But even though Mattel failed Frida Kahlo by ignoring her physical differences, the company had previously attempted to be more inclusive of differently abled people, which is perhaps what makes the Kahlo doll so frustrating for many consumers: Mattel possessed the means to craft a doll that more closely resembled the artist's actual figure, but they simply chose not to.

In 1996, two decades before the Kahlo Barbie debacle, Mattel released the "Share a Smile Becky" Barbie. A special edition doll, Becky's most important, not to mention her most differentiating, accessory is her pink wheelchair. Becky’s narrative on the back of the packaging does not explicitly call attention to her wheelchair use but rather makes vague statements about how Barbie, Christie, and Becky share friendship necklaces, for "they know that nothing is as special as a good friend who really cares about the people in our world!" and that "they're always together loving each other just the way they are!" Included in the front-side packaging, however, the consumer's eye is drawn to the statement that "this doll benefits The National Parent Network on Disabilities & the National Lekotek Center." The National Lekotek Center is an institution that "facilitate[s] interactive play experiences for children with special needs and their families" and "as a national advocate for the needs of play among children with disabilities… influenc[es] how the industry manufactures and retails toys" ("National Lekotek Center"). In a 2005 PMLA article titled "Disability and Representation," Rosemarie Garland-Thomson cites Barbie's "[coming] out as a wheelchair user" as one of the cultural moments that began shifting the conversation about disability in America in the 1990s and early 2000s (522). But Becky was not without her own controversy, as consumers quickly criticized the fact that Barbie's most iconic accessory, her enviable Dream House, could not actually accommodate her wheelchair.

In recent years, there has been an influx of diverse Barbies, including dolls with vitiligo, hearing aids, and prostheses. Mattel's increasing focus on diversity and inclusion certainly benefits child consumers who are now able to play with more dolls that reflect their own experiences. Most of these dolls, however, do not represent real people but rather fictional characters that the company has invented. There are post-Kahlo exceptions, including Paralympians Madison de Rozario and Bebe Vio, but these dolls are notable for being one-of-a-kind dolls launched as part of the "Shero" program. The Kahlo Barbie case study thus begs the question of how disability is and should be represented in doll form, particularly when the subject is a real person rather than a fictional character, such as Becky. On the one hand, Mattel refuses to commodify the gory details of Kahlo's very real injuries and chronic pain. If they had, criticism would likely abound in terms of the ethics of commodifying not just one's art or likeness but her trauma and whether or not an appropriate balance can ever be struck between the full truth, however painful or explicit, and selective storytelling exercised in order to make the personal narrative "age appropriate" (nay, palatable) for young consumers. Yet, on the other hand, when the rhetorical purpose of the Inspiring Woman Series is to pay tribute to the strength and courage of its subjects, is the act of censoring such a massive part of Kahlo's experience not counterintuitive?

Conclusion

Mattel's erasure of Kahlo's disability occurs both materially (the doll's body) and textually (the language used to describe and market the doll). The stakes of this move are high, for "disability is a story we tell about bodies…the way we imagine disability through images and narratives determines the shape of the material world, the distribution of resources, our relationships with one another, and our sense of ourselves" (Garland-Thomson 523).  As a corporation that has, for decades, cultivated the perfect bodies that young people have been socially conditioned to idolize, Mattel is complicit in impacting young girls' body image, no matter how diligently they have claimed otherwise. This fact remains true even as they have worked in recent years to diversify what it means to be and to look like a Barbie with such popular culture manifestations as the Greta Gerwig film, but shifting societal conceptions of beauty and body positivity take time.

Disability may be the most obvious aspect of Kahlo's identity that is overshadowed by Mattel, yet it was not the sole casualty in commodifying the artist for a young mass market. Frida Kahlo's bisexuality, her socialist politics, and the complicated cultural identity she forged for herself by participating in Mexicanidad are not addressed. The exclusion of these pieces of Kahlo's narrative are perhaps less shocking, if surprising at all, given the Barbie's target demographic of young girls aged three to twelve within a capitalist marketplace. But the censure of disability in particular is troubling, especially when Kahlo herself was so forthcoming about her experiences in her artwork, variously depicting herself in a wheelchair and painting the plaster corsets she often wore to support her spine. Pain, trauma, and hospitalization are not unique to adults, and Mattel missed an opportunity to more explicitly position Kahlo as an exemplary figure who used her art to cope with the most difficult, inescapable situations, while becoming, in the process, one of the most lauded artists of the twentieth century.

Note

1. For a brief survey of the Frida Kahlo trademark controversy, see Laurel Wickersham Salisbury, "Rolling Over in Her Grave: Frida Kahlo's Trademarks and Commodified Legacy."

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