By Emily Silk

It was the 1920s. Surrealism was beating the drum of the post-war reformed art world, with a celebration of social disruption and a fetishized eroticism towards sexuality and gender. Surrealists often objectified women and their bodies. The female body was frequently a muse for surrealist art, fulfilling the male gaze, and serving masculine desires. Surrealists wanted to deviate from social-norms, yet it seemed that many of them digested a framework of traditional masculinity, mutually exclusive to femininity.

Photographer and artist Claude Cahun, born Lucy Schwob, was excluded by many surrealists and challenged their concept of fixed gender roles through self-image photographs. Cahun collaborated with her partner who called herself Marcel Moore, producing photographs of Cahun, ranging from striking portraits to theatrical performances. Cahun’s visual ambiguity was so fooling that many historians overlooked her in the index of female surrealists, but today we recognize Cahun’s poignant reckoning with the notion of femininity, turning it into something “manifestly constructed”.

From her 1928 “Self-portrait” alone, Cahun is anything but a typical female model of an erotic male-pleasing surrealist photograph. Her shaven head and bare face challenge her gender identification, how “womanly” she is, and whether she exists as the object of desire. What is more striking is her assertive gaze which sharpens the implicit critique of transgender signals. As opposed to being a fetishized delight for the male gaze, Cahun meets our gaze head-on whilst her reflection looks elsewhere; her mirrored identity does not care for the male viewer. Cahun once stated, “Neuter is the only gender that always suits me,” showing her interchangeable stance towards how one presents their identity. She rejects female homosexuality as either deviant or imitative, and stands in a shame-resistant posture, boldly not denying who she is but resists giving in to an affirmative gender role.

Not only is Cahun seen as the first female artist to defy gender boundaries with such explicit political courage, but she also poignantly reminds us of the sheer celebration of self-exploration through make-up and costume. She was fascinated by performing different identities and personas, from performing as an uncanny man to a gender-ambiguous puppet.

In her photo, “Monsieur”, she transposes herself into a credible male identity from details such as the short neck, large ears, and thin lips representing the fine line between fake and real. She proves how easy it is to fake masculinity, and therefore denying its neutrality.

In “Don’t Kiss Me I Am in Training” she creates ambiguity from iconographic make-up, a flat chest, and drawn on nipples. She transforms herself into a puppet, shifting the mortal paradoxically expressed into non-life.

Cahun and her partner produced these photographs at their home and never exhibited them. They exude a private dialogue between Cahun and her partner, and exemplify how Cahun did not give up on her questioning of identity despite being rejected by many surrealists. The sheer intimacy of Cahun’s willing to flaunt her own curiosity, during a time where the exploration of the self could be damaging should no doubt make us all want to embrace self-exploration and defiance of gender roles.

St.Art does not own the images used in this post.