Rodriguez, Isis

The Chicana artist I choose to do my presentation on is Isis Rodriguez.

I thought Alicia Gaspar de Alba's article "Out of the House, the Halo, and the Whore's Mask: The Mirror of Malinchismo" was very interesting. The fact that out of all the pieces chosen for the CARA exhibition, only a few were made by women, was really astonishing and yet not. One of the things that really stuck out to me was that in the "Feminist Visions" room, all the pieces were done by women, leading to the idea that only women care about achieving a feminist consciousness. This idea isn't all that surprising due to how often women are overlooked and relegated to the roles that their culture and society assigns to them. Gender and sexuality is most often ignored because the patriarchal institutions embedded everywhere do not wish to see the values that they so admire destroyed.

Furthermore, what was really aggravating was that of the women featured in pieces and installations done by men, the women were shown as members of patriarchal institutions, as male representations of women, or, like in Frida Kahlo's case, were appropriated. This goes to show how women can be cast as inferior and submissive to men, yet when men or patriarchal institutions need them to serve a purpose, we are just supposed to stand aside and let them do as they please.

A question that I have to ask Professor Gaspar de Alba is how do you think that Malinchismo can be applied to our everyday lives?