The performative photography by Claude Cahun

Abstract

This essay aims to contextualize Claude Cahun's literary and artistic works which remain to this day, as well as in the early 20th century, unclassifiable. Her work lies, apparently, in a place in-between places: denominations, languages, genres, reality and autofiction, between the unprecedented and the mythic. Cahun's radical experiences in the Arts, Literature and Politics made her, simultaneously, a vanguardist and an outsider. She proposed fluidity amongst identity roles, because she had no interest in repeating herself to others, even less to herself. She broke off with binary categories and dualisms imposed by social norms and in agreement with the effervescence instituted to modern thinking, from Marxism to psychoanalysis, the interpretation of subjectivity and the numerous philosophic inquiries regarding the subject's presence in the world, obviously approached in Art, Claude definitely put the quest for ‘the Truth' under suspicion.