{"id":17309,"date":"2022-10-06T14:31:27","date_gmt":"2022-10-06T14:31:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/artjournalstg.wpenginepowered.com\/?p=17309"},"modified":"2022-10-11T13:16:39","modified_gmt":"2022-10-11T13:16:39","slug":"through-the-guillotine-mirror-claude-cahuns-theory-of-trans-against-the-void","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/?p=17309","title":{"rendered":"Through the Guillotine Mirror: Claude Cahun\u2019s Theory of Trans against the Void"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

After the deaths of antifascist Surrealist artist pair Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore in 1954 and 1972, respectively, their artwork and writings fell into obscurity until the 1980s when art historian Fran\u00e7ois Leperlier unearthed the parts of their oeuvre spared from Nazi hands. Coinciding with an era of feminist interventions in art\u2019s discourses, Cahun and Moore\u2019s coupledom, gender nonconformity, and many masked self-portraits readily dovetailed with the era\u2019s sexual politics. The pair was quickly incorporated into the new and substantive attention being paid to women artists\u2019 affronts to the modern male gaze. Some narrated Cahun as a proto\u2013Cindy Sherman, ceaselessly swapping disguises to play with the camera\u2019s production of sexual difference. Meanwhile Tirza True Latimer\u2019s and Abigail Solomon-Godeau\u2019s research invaluably situated Cahun and Moore within the 1920s Parisian lesbian subcultures where gender and sexual deviance were wielded in defiance of patriarchal power.1<\/a><\/sup> Though the 1990s was also a period in which trans scholars sought to correct the archive by recovering forgotten and miscategorized trans histories, Cahun and Moore\u2019s gender nonconformity did not cue parallel research in trans cultural studies. This was likely in part due to the fact that Cahun and Moore had not expressed unequivocal desire to become men, instead leaving behind an archival battery of twisted gender signals. Accordingly, the discovery of Cahun and Moore\u2019s oeuvre slipped through the shadow of an eclipse at the temporal convergence of feminist and trans scholars\u2019 oversight of trans nonbinary subjects.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

More recent examinations of Cahun and Moore\u2019s work have described the pair as prototransgender artists. Latimer now describes Cahun\u2019s writing as \u201ctextual transvestitism\u201d (travestisme<\/em>) aimed at resisting identification according to social gender constructs.2<\/a><\/sup> Christy Wampole connects Cahun\u2019s adopted name and appearance to twenty-first-century genderqueer identities, arguing that photographs of Cahun\u2019s \u201cimpudent gaze\u201d that displayed \u201ctransgender signals\u201d of shamelessness are a prototype for today\u2019s trans self-representations.3<\/a><\/sup> However, contemporary texts and exhibitions largely continue to describe Cahun and Moore as lesbian women, underscoring the need to transvalue Cahun and Moore according to current scholarship for identifying nonbinary historical figures who are not plainly legible as trans. Historians, and curators\u2019 reliance upon \u201caccurate\u201d period terms which lacked trans terminology flattens the complex fabric of histories of gender in the West, which testify to the constant presence of people who clashed with gender conventions.4<\/a><\/sup> That those individuals often do not conform to today\u2019s familiar trans narratives does not invalidate their identification as trans but instead allows us to develop more comprehensive frameworks for making sense of trans subjectivity.5<\/a><\/sup> As Robert Mills writes, the continuation of \u201cepistemological violence\u201d which fails to recognize historical subjects as trans nonbinary within their own era also \u201crisks impoverishing our sense of the past as a field of possibility, plurality, and difference.\u201d6<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I argue that not only did Cahun and Moore live trans lives but their artwork deliberately opposed the medical and psychological discourses of their era which sought to find the \u201ctruth\u201d of binary gender \u201cwithin\u201d trans and intersex subjects. Working with the camera\u2019s ontological cut of the visible surface of reality from its substance, they mobilized photography to challenge the fallacies of scientific discourses while visualizing alternatives for a self-determined embodiment that reconfigured the body\u2019s exterior without sacrificing the interior\u2019s integrity for the false prize of cultural legibility. As such, their work offers insight into a trans-before-transsexuality somatic imaginary which anticipated transsexual medicine with trepidation. Their photographic theorization of trans selfhood described a stridently misfit corporeality politically engaged with broader struggles for liberation, rather than one aimed at harmonizing with mainstream heteronorms. Though contemporary terminology and conceptions of trans identity are certainly not exactly what the artists imagined for themselves, I demonstrate that trans people\u2019s underground engagement with Cahun and Moore\u2019s work was in fact palpable within the 1990s and 2000s movement to break from the female-to-male\/male-to-female (FTM\/MTF) transsexual mold, constituting a trans temporal \u201ctouch\u201d that effected the emergence of more porous forms of trans identity. This fact complicates the idea that it is more accurate to read Cahun and Moore as lesbians, instead suggesting that the emergence of supposedly new nonbinary identities are in some cases the outgrowth of Cahun and Moore\u2019s purposeful stitching together of past, present, and future fields of possibility.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I also assert that the use of gender-neutral \u201cthey\u201d pronouns productively points to Cahun and Moore\u2019s authorial voice. Cahun\u2019s ceaseless revision of their own ever-emerging identity beckons a correspondent historical practice that regularly reappraises what we once thought to be true of them. Cahun described themself as \u201cneuter\u201d and \u201cme, he she\u2014or simply it\u201d\u2014a subjectivity made up of a \u201ccollection of exceptions\u201d to syntax\u2019s rules.7<\/a><\/sup> This shuffling of gendered speech is a familiar characteristic of the trans historical archive. Carolyn Dinshaw points to such binary-crossed language as the very confusion of categories that announces trans presence in historical documents.8<\/a><\/sup> As I explore here, \u201cthey\u201d does not suggest an oversimple relationship between trans now and then but instead fruitfully entangles past and present perversions of normative gender.9<\/a><\/sup> In other words, it is not an invocation of sameness but a mapping of shared conduits for gender\u2019s troublesome fluidity. \u201cThey\u201d also functions as both singular and plural, signaling the merger of subject and gaze in their collaborative self-portraits, described as \u201cportrait of one or the other, our two narcissisms drowning there.\u201d10<\/a><\/sup> I further continue that merger by allowing Moore to selectively slide above and below the text, as they did in the oeuvre they produced with Cahun\u2014where they were frequently behind the camera for Cahun\u2019s \u201cself portraits\u201d or the unnamed coauthor of texts. Their major written work, Disavowals; Or, Cancelled Confessions<\/em> (Aveux non avenus<\/em>, 1930), forcefully blurs the source of authorial voice, consistent with the obfuscating function of singular plural pronouns. In a section of the text entitled \u201cSingular Plural,\u201d they state, \u201cI am one, you are the other. Or the opposite . . . . It\u2019s hard enough just to disentangle them.\u201d11<\/a><\/sup> \u201cThey\u201d thus accounts for both gender and the deliberate slippage of identity between Cahun and Moore while extending that slip to the trans temporal lapse through which their time touches our own.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Cahun was born into an influential family in Nantes, France, in 1894, meeting Moore as a teenager and later becoming stepsiblings. The pair quickly became inseparable and remained together as lovers, collaborators, and political agitators throughout their lifetimes. Living in Paris during the 1920s and 1930s, they adopted gender-ambiguous names and became versed in contemporary sexological literature that sought to describe homosexuality and gender variance.12<\/a><\/sup> Cahun consistently contradicted social expectations for both men and women, even within the fringe lesbian and Surrealist subcultures which both entertained gender-crossing appearances. In snapshots Cahun adopts a variety of gender embodiments over the course of their lifetime. During their teens and early twenties they predominately appear in the attire typical of effeminate male homosexual figures. Later they add to this a myriad of feminine, androgynous, and gender-illegible styles. Their oft shaved head was atypical for lesbians, who regularly appropriated stylized male haircuts.13<\/a><\/sup> Further, by dying their shorn hair pink or green and donning outlandish clothing and eye makeup, Cahun pronounced their misfit with the norms of gender or sexual minority subcultures around them. Even the radical artists and writers close to Cahun were sometimes unsettled by their indecipherability. In 1933 Pierre Caminade described Cahun as \u201cthe bizarre<\/em>, the bizarre made into a woman, a kind of lightning strike by surreality.\u201d14<\/a><\/sup> Cahun\u2019s defiance of the terms of gender\u2019s legibility apparently challenged the bounds of decorum, even for those who countered the tastes of their era.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Living shamelessly out of step with the world around them, Cahun signals how interwar European trans nonbinary identity might have configured embodiment as a rejection of biopolitical power. Cahun and Moore\u2019s artistic and political lives were closely tied\u2014becoming increasingly so with the rising threat of fascism\u2014and they joined several Surrealists in the Association des \u00e9crivains et artistes r\u00e9volutionnaire (Association of revolutionary writers and artists)in 1932. Cahun linked sexual and gender liberties to struggles against racist oppression, writing that maintaining one\u2019s freedom of expression and lifestyle was critical to opposing Hitler and fighting for \u201cthe rights of the human being oppressed by centuries of ferocious superstitions.\u201d15<\/a><\/sup> The couple continued their artistic and political resistance while living on the Isle of Jersey under Nazi occupation during the Second World War. Disguising themselves as innocuous heterosexual women, they covertly encouraged German soldiers to defect for several years until they were discovered in 1944 and imprisoned, and their life\u2019s work largely destroyed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Given the Nazis\u2019 suppression of gender and sexual deviance and so-called degenerate art, the works destroyed by Nazi soldiers may well represent more radical deviations from sexual and gender norms than the photographs that survived. However, the extant staged portraits and photomontages made while the couple lived in Paris show that Cahun and Moore queered photography\u2019s indexicality in unprecedented ways. They regarded the camera as just one element of an expanded photographic process which consisted of endless iterations of costuming, posing, shooting, cutting, and montaging in an effort to theorize the reality of trans selfhood against a void of contemporaneous language and role models.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Touching Claude Cahun<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

The fragmentary shape of archival accounts of queer and trans lives requires a range of historical practices for recuperating queer subjects whose identities cannot be absolutely confirmed by contemporary epistemological frameworks for gender and sexuality. The notion of queer, cross-temporal \u201ctouches\u201d describes how contemporary recognition of queer historical figures can compose lived relationships between queers of past and present.16<\/a><\/sup> Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick describes this relation of touch as \u201ctouching feeling,\u201d summoning the immediacy of the corporeal and emotional senses implicated in the hunt for queer history.17<\/a><\/sup> Feeling suggests permeability where there is supposed to be boundary; glue where one looks for separation; discovery of the self in the other; losing track of the other in the self. To that (unending) end, the feeling touch across time is an embodied, affective coemergence of queer subjects in which one finds that somehow, as implausible as it seems, time must have turned to matter because distinctions between oneself now and an other then prove unentanglable. In this way gender variance in the past threads through the fabric of queer subjectivity in the present. Likewise, stray filaments of queer lives flecking archives of times where one thought they were not suggest a dissipated queer emergence strung through time with no bounded moment of origin.18<\/a><\/sup> This kind of temporal touch fingers that sticky slippery, handle of the nature of trans itself: a subjectivity which is at once a permanent feature of gendered sociality but also never fixed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\"Painted
Romain Brooks, Self Portrait<\/em>, 1923, oil on canvas, 46\u00bc x 26\u215e in. (117.5 x 68.3\u2009cm). Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC, Gift of the artist (artwork \u00a9 Romain Brooks; photograph provided by Smithsonian American Art Museum\/Art Resource, NY)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Filling absences left by the heteronormative archival gaze is thus not simply an episode of correcting history but also of queer identity\u2019s becoming in the present and future. Introducing Women Together\/Women Apart<\/em> (2005), which documents Cahun and Moore\u2019s lives along with interwar Parisian lesbian artists, Latimer names such a queer temporal touch which began as a \u201cshock of recognition\u201d during her youth and remained alive as the kindling for her later research into unaccounted-for lesbian histories. As a young person encountering Romaine Brooks\u2019s Self-Portrait<\/em> in a museum, Latimer recognized \u201cmy kind of woman<\/em>\u201d in the masculine attire and insolent stance of the painting\u2019s subject.19<\/a><\/sup> \u201cNot needing confirmation from the wall text (which offered none in any event),\u201d Latimer felt a sense of recognition that instilled in her an \u201cawareness of alternatives to the scenarios of marriage and motherhood that shaped a woman\u2019s destiny\u201d otherwise unimaginable from the perspective of her postwar suburban upbringing. Filling in the gaps of the heteronormative archival gaze with queer, cross-temporal recognition supplied Latimer with \u201cunnamed potential, unimagined horizons of possibility\u201d that made her own queer life livable in the absence of living role models.20<\/a><\/sup> Though the portrait was merely a fragmented suggestion of a gender-nonconforming life without proper account, that encounter pressed Latimer onto a previously unthinkable life path.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\"A
Micah Bazant, page from TimTum: A Trans Jew Zine<\/em>, 1999, reproducing a work by Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, Untitled<\/em>, 1921\u201322, 8\u00bd x 5\u00bd in. (21.6 x 14.0\u2009cm). Collection of the artist (artwork \u00a9 Micah Bazant; photograph provided by Micah Bazant)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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A similar shock of recognition was recorded in a touch shared between Cahun and trans activist artist Micah Bazant on the heels of the first appearances of Cahun\u2019s work in the United States. Encountering a portrait of Cahun in the New York Guggenheim\u2019s Rrose is a Rrose is a Rrose: Gender Performance and Photography<\/em> exhibition catalog (1997), Bazant presented a trans counterreading of Cahun in their widely distributed underground zine, Timtum: A Trans Jew Zine<\/em> (1999).21<\/a><\/sup> Bazant describes Cahun as a yearned-for role model who lived a gendered embodiment \u201cdifferent in ways that had [and] have no name.\u201d22<\/a><\/sup> Cutting, pasting, and photocopying Cahun and Moore\u2019s photographs into their zine, Bazant recontextualized Cahun as a historical mirror for a \u201cfabulously different\u201d gender identity, captioning one portrait \u201cClaude as a young boy at the age of 27.\u201d The portrait of Cahun bears striking resemblances to Brooks\u2019s. Each figure dons the masculine attire and swishy gestures of a dandy. However, Brooks\u2019s eyes, shadowed by a top hat, and upturned collar suggest that she is poised to blend in as she descends into the city nightlife. She is in masculine disguise. In contrast, Cahun is decidedly conspicuous. Their shaved head is sharply defined by its stark, tonal difference from the black backdrop. Cahun does not blend in. Unlike Brooks\u2019s shaded gaze, Cahun\u2019s taunts the camera in repudiation of both conformity and shame. Echoing Latimer\u2019s gaining a sense of life\u2019s possibility when finding her kind of woman<\/em> in Brooks, Bazant claims Cahun as their kind of boy<\/em> to legitimate alternatives to male and female embodiment yet unnamed in the 1990s. Published at the horizon of the rise of nonbinary trans identities, Bazant\u2019s portrait pairs \u201cyoung boy\u201d with \u201cage of 27\u201d to indicate both the common age misrecognition of trans people and the idea that boyhood is not so much an indicator of youthfulness as a gendered status lying somewhere between androgynous childhood and manhood. \u201cSometimes boy<\/em> feels like a revolutionary new gender\u201d; Bazant explains their ambivalence about the potential of the label \u201cboy\u201d as meeting the need for language to describe people like themself. \u201cSometimes . . . it\u2019s the closest choice I got.\u201d23<\/a><\/sup> Cahun\u2019s appearance affirms Bazant\u2019s felt sense of self in the absence of role models during their historical present.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bazant\u2019s zine refutes the claim that it is new to identify Cahun as trans, instead attesting to the simultaneous divergent reading of Cahun and Moore\u2019s archive through cross-temporal touches that make untenable a clear accounting of the distinctions between trans identities of the past and present. Bazant forcefully revises the archive\u2019s cisnormative account of Cahun, reproducing and altering texts from various 1990s monographs on a page titled \u201cClaude Cahun: Jewish genderfreak anti-Nazi resistance fighter.\u201d Where Rosalind Krauss finds the chosen name \u201cClaude\u201d as evidence of \u201cparading one\u2019s lesbianism,\u201d Bazant sees a reflection of their own gender-neutral name, intended to encourage people to \u201csee me beyond my gender.\u201d24<\/a><\/sup> Bazant adds \u201ctrans gender\u201d to descriptions of \u201clesbianism.\u201d They selectively alter art historians\u2019 use of pronouns to create gender-anomalous statements, such as \u201che<\/em> surrounded herself<\/em>\u201d and \u201cshe<\/em> adopted a mask of masculinity that he<\/em> further exaggerated.\u201d25<\/a><\/sup> Interleaving Cahun\u2019s biography and images with Bazant\u2019s personal narratives of transition, Jewish identity, drawings, trans educational resources, Jewish histories, and queered Yiddish language definitions, Bazant draws Cahun into a text designed to contribute to building shared possibilities for trans life for those who cannot find their way in FTM\/MTF identities. Troubling distinctions between trans past and present, Cahun\u2019s portraits appearing in the zine can be regarded as one of many touches belonging to efforts in the 1990s and 2000s to unleash \u201ctrans\u201d and \u201ctransition\u201d from transsexual medicine\u2019s assumptions about gender.26<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bazant and Cahun\u2019s touch is not merely an essentialized (mis)recognition constructed between gender-nonconforming people that elides differences between their historical contexts but more precisely a recognition between those unable to locate themselves on the incomplete map for gendered life particular to their own eras. In one frequently cited quotation Cahun states, \u201cMasculine? Feminine? That depends on the occasion. Neuter is the only gender that invariably suits me. If it existed in our language one would not observe this oscillation in my thinking.\u201d27<\/a><\/sup> The 1990s authoring of Cahun\u2019s biography as female has caused art historians to persistently read such statements either as Cahun\u2019s refusal to occupy a stable authorial subjectivity or as related to the period term \u201cinvert,\u201d which described homosexuality as expressing an inverted gender identity. While the latter reflects the sexological literature of Cahun and Moore\u2019s era, the former reproduces that literature\u2019s problematic assumption that subjectivity can only be stabilized within male or female gendered embodiment, failing to recognize that Cahun\u2019s stated identification as neuter (neutre<\/em>) contradicts such a cross-gender notion of inversion. Although trans identities that claim their ontological condition to existence in the negative\u2014such as nonbinary, gender nonconforming, and agender\u2014seem to meet Cahun\u2019s stated desire for an alternative to the masculine\u2013feminine binary, art historians have cautioned against reading Cahun in terms of the \u201cfluidity\u201d of \u201cpostmodern\u201d identity categories, eliding embodied and lived trans identities with the postmodern tendency to detach surfaces from substance.28<\/a><\/sup> Implications that trans people are a new \u201cphenomena\u201d who do not preexist language to describe them grants dominance to 1950s transsexual medicine for \u201cinventing\u201d trans people who are \u201cconstructed\u201d by doctors rather than ontologically gendered in the way cismen and ciswomen are believed to be.29<\/a><\/sup> The mistake here is, on the one hand, the assumption that \u201cman\u201d and \u201cwoman\u201d\u2014and likewise \u201clesbian\u201d\u2014enjoy a historical stability which \u201ctrans\u201d uniquely lacks.30<\/a><\/sup> On the other hand, it mirrors the very constraints placed upon gendered life which Cahun actively defied. There is no reason to assume that Cahun and Moore did not work for legitimation of gendered subjectivity believed impossible during their time. In fact, everything about their oeuvre suggests they did.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Turn-of-the-century sexological discourse theorized that same-sex desire resulted from cross-gender identification, first referred to as \u201cinversion\u201d by sexologist Havelock Ellis in 1897. Cahun\u2019s translation of Ellis\u2019s writings into French and familiarity with the work of his predecessor German psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing\u2019s work is frequently cited as evidence that Cahun likely understood their gender variance in terms of sexuality.31<\/a><\/sup> However, Jay Prosser\u2019s analysis of sexologists\u2019 case studies demonstrates that the term \u201cinvert\u201d originally indicated trans identity rather than sexual identity, which characterized the bulk of the autobiographical narratives they studied.32<\/a><\/sup> \u201cHomosexual\u201d erroneously replaced \u201cinvert\u201d following Sigmund Freud\u2019s reauthoring of trans autobiographical accounts in terms of momentary gender identifications experienced en route to fixed sexual-object choices. Ellis was himself undecided on the issue and critical of Freud\u2019s heavy-handed revisions as signaling a mistrust of the authenticity of patients\u2019 experience. Diverging from Freud, Ellis\u2019s Psychology of Sex<\/em> (1933) continued to explore gender as a mutable spectrum unlinked from biology and sexuality.33<\/a><\/sup> However, Freud\u2019s revisions had already marked an aggressive turn in the sexological literature toward largely studying and explaining sexuality rather than gender identity, leaving a void in psychological discourse that would not be filled until the term \u201ctranssexual\u201d emerged in the 1950s as an object of medical discourse whose treatment involved somatic rather than psychological intervention.34<\/a><\/sup> Meanwhile, as Julian Gill-Peterson and Kadji Amin document, this same period was also the \u201cglandular era\u201d of eugenicist medical discourse, during which intersexuality, transvestitism, and homosexuality were attributed to \u201cdisorders\u201d of testes and ovaries. Ambiguously gendered people were subjected to invasive surgeries and visual technologies which sought to discover their \u201ctrue\u201d sex and correct errant characteristics.35<\/a><\/sup> The assumption that a stable male or female gender identity could be found within the mind or body therefore characterized psychological and medical discourses during Cahun\u2019s lifetime.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In contrast, Cahun and Moore\u2019s engagement with sexological literature demonstrates not only resistance to the conflations of gender, sexuality, and biology of their era but insistent attempts to touch the trans possibilities of the era prior, tracing the same steps Prosser would later recover. Cahun and Moore became familiar with sexological discourse as teenagers. In their first collaboratively authored text, \u201cLes jeux uraniens\u201d (The uranian games, ca. 1913), the couple employed the term \u201curanian\u201d (uranien<\/em>), a literary reference to Karl Heinrich Ulrichs\u2019s writing in 1860s Germany.36<\/a><\/sup> Though uranian is frequently understood in terms of Ulrichs\u2019s later reputation as an advocate of homosexuality, the term was in fact part of Ulrichs\u2019s project to categorize a spectrum of subjectivities relating to trans and homosexual experience. \u201cUranian\u201d described his own experience as \u201cthe soul of a woman enclosed in a man\u2019s body.\u201d37<\/a><\/sup> Krafft-Ebing drew upon Ulrichs\u2019s account to theorize \u201cinverted sexual instinct\u201d as a cross-gender condition that sometimes but not always accompanied homosexuality.38<\/a><\/sup> \u201cLes jeux uraniens\u201d also quotes homosexual playwright Oscar Wilde, famously convicted of \u201cgross acts of indecency\u201d in 1895, whom Cahun frequently emulated in their dandyish public appearance. Elizabeth Freeman aptly describes such embodiments of past identities as \u201ctemporal drag,\u201d indicating how the weighty tug of history informs queer gender performance in the present.39<\/a><\/sup> I propose that this queer temporal \u201cfeeling backward\u201d of Cahun and Moore\u2019s early collaborations resonates throughout their oeuvre.40<\/a><\/sup> By locating their own identities along twisted, biotemporal routes through the subjectivities of nineteenth-century trans women and effeminate men, Cahun and Moore cobble together the possibility of a trans nonbinary subjectivity out of queer, cross-temporal touches. Their oscillations between past and present theorize trans selfhood by eliciting an unnamed chasm beyond discreet categories of male and female, body and mind, interior and exterior\u2014posing incontrovertible resistance to twentieth-century scientific discourse\u2019s attempts to stabilize biological sex within such binaries.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Seeming to mock both psychoanalytic and intersex medical discourses, which wielded an array of tools from X-rays to dreamwork to find the facts of sex within the gender-variant subject\u2019s interior, the couple\u2019s later turn to photomontage posits photography as a parallel surgical technology of corporeal and psychic invasion. In one 1930 photomontage from Disavowals; Or, Cancelled Confessions,<\/em> Cahun looks directly into the camera lens, a montaged pistol pressed to their temple, merging gun and camera \u201cshots\u201d to suggest that only death will finally make available the \u201ctruth\u201d of the body\u2019s interiority. Flayed by camera and scissors, Cahun\u2019s surreal entrails spill onto the darkroom\u2019s operating table\u2014four sets of ribs, human parts merged with bird parts inside and out, headless bodies, bodyless heads, and skinless faces. A scissor-severed beak (left<\/em>) is the silenced voice of an illegible creature, while lips (right<\/em>) part to reveal a hand in place of a tongue\u2014an illegible body-voice. Cahun and Moore draw attention to the impotence of language to describe this mess of interiors and exteriors, species and genders. The montage flies in the face of science by exposing Cahun\u2019s interior as an interminable hall of mirrors where every interior \u201cfact\u201d turns out again to be a monstrous exterior construction. Cahun writes that though the \u201csurgical blade\u201d expects to \u201cencounter an ivory core\u201d within its subjects, what it finds is \u201cjust rubbish, rubbish, piles of rubbish all the way into its unrecognizable center.\u201d41<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\"A
Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, HUM<\/em>, 1930, photomontage introducing chapter 7 in Claude Cahun, Aveux non avenus (Disavowals; Or, Cancelled Confessions)<\/em>, Paris: \u00c9ditions du Carrefour, 1930 (artwork \u00a9 Claude Cahun; photograph provided by the Jersey Heritage Collections, St. Helier, Jersey)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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In contesting fallacies regarding the gender-nonconforming subject\u2019s interiority, Cahun cracks the backbone of myths about so-called biological nature. The final photomontage of Disavowals; Or, Cancelled Confessions<\/em> postulates that \u201cfacts\u201d about the vitality of heterosexuality are equally imaginary. Multiple iterations of Cahun\u2019s own face tower one on top of another to form an erect phallus climbing toward the heterosexual ideals that float above. The Russian dolls incubating fetuses and the tetrahedron-encased nuclear family parade the perfection of clone-like, clockwork procreation. The flag reading \u201cLa Sainte Famille\u201d (the Holy Family) announces the father\u2013mother\u2013son trinity as a \u201ctriple-faced monster\u201d of French nationalist fantasy.42<\/a><\/sup> In contrast to the heterosexual pair who breed just one future patriarch, Cahun is arguably more fecund. They propagate seventeen heads from their own flesh. The text sheathing the Cahun-faced phallus reads: \u201cUnder this mask, another mask. I will never finish removing all these faces.\u201d They suggest that the vigorous drive for self-knowledge is behind their prolificacy. In contrast, the hardy biological facts of sex appear to be at an evolutionary disadvantage here, overidealized to the point of emptiness. The camera\u2019s \u201cmechanical reproduction\u201d is posited as a politically radical technological alternative to heterosexual procreation.43<\/a><\/sup> A few pages after the montage appears they describe posing for the camera as a means to \u201cmake my own vocabulary\u201d with which to \u201cdivide myself to rule myself, multiply myself so I can make my mark.\u201d44<\/a><\/sup> Cahun\u2019s masks pile a lexicon of poses against the gaping chasm unchartered by the sexological discourse of their present.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\"A
Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, I.O.U.<\/em>, 1930, photomontage introducing chapter 9 in Claude Cahun, Aveux non avenus (Disavowals; Or, Cancelled Confessions)<\/em> Paris: \u00c9ditions du Carrefour, 1930 (artwork \u00a9 Claude Cahun; photograph provided by the Jersey Heritage Collections, St. Helier, Jersey)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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They heap photographic index upon index upon index as if to point all fingers and facts at a way of being that feels existentially real yet remains unrecognized in interwar France. In a photographic temporal reach of snaps and skips that rivals the biological time of child-bearing reproduction, Cahun\u2019s masks pitch the radical possibilities of gendered pasts against the void of the present with a plunk that resounds within the cavernous remains of a posttranssexual future. In other words, these photographs bear fruits.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bit by the Guillotine Mirror<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

It is perhaps precisely because Cahun\u2019s montaged bodies bear little resemblance to those typically associated with trans embodiment and cannot be interpreted as literal surgical interventions that their work is an invaluable contribution to histories of the trans somatic imaginary. Their inexhaustible corporeal transformations theorize trans as the constant surfacing of gender formations which refuse fixity (remarkably prescient of medical perspectives that legitimize the fluidity of one\u2019s gender identity over time and which remain marginalized within trans healthcare today).45<\/a><\/sup> Cahun breaks the facticity of the photograph and the legibility of the body alike to conceptualize a trans corporeal transformation unhinged from the indexicality of the sexed body. In a passage opposing the divvying of the self into psychoanalytic \u201cdrives\u201d and medicalized \u201cglands\u201d they gesture to an interior sense of self that has no indexical counterpart:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When the mechanism has been completely deconstructed, the mystery remains intact. Sometimes chance hands us a little swatch of soul. We put it away in a drawer. Soon it will be impossible to match it with the piece of fabric it originally came from.46<\/a><\/sup><\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Cahun\u2019s carefully preserved fragment of true self has no body or name into which it might settle to compose a stable fit between signifier or signified. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Cahun\u2019s photographic process is not that of seeking to describe the swatch of soul more accurately\u2014for that would make it the subject of the diagnostic gaze\u2014but to make it the active agent of personal transformation. Speaking again to the sacred fragment, they declare, \u201clive and grow in me, he she\u2014or simply it\u2014that allowed me, still young, to understand that I should only, because I can only, connect with, change myself.\u201d47<\/a><\/sup> The text brims with a constant desire to alter the body, \u201cchange skin,\u201d \u201cmetamorphose,\u201d \u201ctransform,\u201d and sever body parts:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If an element doesn\u2019t fit my composition, I leave it out. One thing after the other, I eliminate everything . . . . I shave my head, pull out my teeth, remove my breasts . . . everything that perturbs or waylays my regard: the stomach, the ovaries, the mind, conscious and cyst-bound.48<\/a><\/sup><\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

In a slippage between artistic process and body modification, Cahun cleaves body and psyche until only the heartbeat remains as a final achievement of \u201cperfection.\u201d49<\/a><\/sup> The impulse to remove breasts and ovaries in order to appease their discomfort conforms to contemporary diagnoses of gender dysphoria and the surgeries prescribed to assuage it. However, their wish to lop off flesh and bone until only the bare condition of life remains exceeds any plausible interpretation of gender dysphoria or transition. Today Cahun\u2019s narrative would not be rubber-stamped by doctors who continue to require patients to articulate standardized \u201cwrong body\u201d narratives to obtain authorization for medical transition. Their gender can neither be pinned to the sexed characteristics of their embodiment nor cured by surgical intervention, instead expressing the desire for a trans \u201cembodied difference\u201d that conceptualizes \u201cgenders as potentially porous and permeable spatial territories.\u201d50<\/a><\/sup> Guided by self-knowledge in opposition to normalizing discourses, theirs is a trans corporeal transformation that neither \u201clands\u201d in a stable and legible embodiment nor pathologizes that fact. They engage in a somatic becoming that has no prescribed end point.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Specific attributes of photographic technology supply Cahun the power to radically embody their difference as the refusal of gender fixity itself. The camera\u2019s ontological mode of record making is a cut. It severs a framed slice of the visible surface of reality from its lived substance and temporal fabric. Cahun accordingly calls the camera a \u201cguillotine window\u201d\u2014an antiquated reference to the blades of the camera shutter, which for Cahun emphasizes the fatal laceration of the body. They describe adding silver to the guillotine window\u2014a reference to the backing of a mirror and also the grains of light-sensitized silver in photographic film and paper\u2014which makes the photographic apparatus double as window and mirror, positioning Cahun and Moore each on either and both sides at once.51<\/a><\/sup> Similarly, they name the camera\u2019s lens \u201cour double eyelid.\u201d52<\/a><\/sup> It is the gateway to the hall of guillotine mirrors. The lens both sees the visible surface of the world and also projects it inward to the camera\u2019s dark interior so that one might behold at once the swatch of soul and the fabric of reality.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The photographic \u201ccut\u201d also fits well with Cahun\u2019s frequent references to masks and unmasking. The meaning of the word \u201cmask\u201d (masque<\/em>) also refers to the darkroom technique (masque photographique<\/em>) of blocking the exposure of select areas of an image. Cahun and Moore apply this kind of photographic masking to make photomontages both in the darkroom and in the studio, where black cloth blocks out areas of the body or environment. Photographic masking techniques allow them to \u201cunmask nature\u201d by turning the body into mere surface, severed from somatic experience. In one untitled pair of photographs, Cahun appears against a dark backdrop that has been temporarily pinned to a wall, revealing the self-conscious construction of images that were likely not intended to be exhibited full frame as they appear here. Cahun wears a dark cloth wrapped around their chest and arms. The dark background and clothing mask the body and room to perform the first cut of the guillotine mirror, making Cahun\u2019s body appear to float in a void to enable later montaging and composite printing. The blackness around Cahun\u2019s figure becomes the nonplace of blankness that obscures the difference between the material background of the homemade studio, the blackness of the camera\u2019s interior, the darkness of the darkroom, the negative space of the collage, and the inner conscience of photographer and subject. From the moment of exposure, the image refracts through lens, eyelid, and mirror into multiple darkened spaces of camera, darkroom, montage, and psyche. Cahun is thus both masked (photographically cut) and unmasked (shorn of gender signifiers). Masking produces a slippage between reality and image, interior and exterior. Cahun\u2019s figure turns from real to mask, from photographic trace to stray phantasm, from tangible signifier to inner sensation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Once Cahun and Moore make a photograph, it becomes part of their narrow repertoire of images to be repeatedly recycled and reconfigured. No amount of masks ceaselessly refracting through a hall of guillotine mirrors can settle the question of the identity of Cahun\u2019s swatch. The mirrors instead bring us into the heart of the dysphoric interior\u2013surface tangle of the trans nonbinary subject\u2019s embodiment. In \u201cBedroom Carnival\u201d (Carnaval en chambre, 1926) Cahun describes the accumulations of masks both \u201ccarnal\u201d and \u201cverbal\u201d acquired in the course of growing up:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I had spent my solitary hours disguising my soul. The masks had become so perfect that when the time came for them to walk across the plaza of my conscience, they didn\u2019t recognize each other. I adopted the most off-putting opinions one by one, those that displeased me the most had the best chance of success. But the make-up that I employed seemed indelible. I scrubbed so hard to wash it off myself that I took off my skin. And my soul, like a flayed face, no longer had a human form.53<\/a><\/sup><\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

<\/div>\n\n\n\n
\"A
Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, Untitled<\/em>, ca. 1920, gelatin silver print, 8\u215c x 4\u215e in. (21.0 x 12.4\u2009cm). Jersey Heritage Collections, St. Helier, Jersey (artwork \u00a9 Claude Cahun; photograph provided by the Jersey Heritage Collections)
<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\"A
Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, Untitled<\/em>, ca. 1920, black-and-white negative, 4\u215d x 3\u215d (11.8 x 9.2\u2009cm). Jersey Heritage Collections, St. Helier, Jersey (artwork \u00a9 Claude Cahun; photograph provided by the Jersey Heritage Collections)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
<\/div>\n\n\n\n

Cahun recalls a lifetime of assembling a false persona calculated as the perfect disguise for a self who had no chance of surviving by the gender norms of the society into which it was born. As many scholars have already pointed out, such statements anticipate Judith Butler\u2019s theory of gender performativity in which the child\u2019s gradual accrual of gestures, habits, and appearances which match their assigned gender eventually creates the illusion that gender naturally emanates from the sexed body rather than having been externally imposed.54<\/a><\/sup> However, Cahun\u2019s effort to scrub all masks away also describes the trans nonbinary subject\u2019s horror at discovering the impossibility of returning to a \u201cpure\u201d embodiment untouched by gender. The desire to touch a past only sensible inside the self points to aspects of gender Butler overlooks: that gender performance is not so much characterized by the emptiness of copied copies but by the earnestness of turning temporally backward to feel around for the original left behind.55<\/a><\/sup> This search is inevitably belated. By the time one discerns their appearance as merely a clever facade, the false exterior has indelibly inked the interior. Cahun is haunted by the sense that another self was once possible. What such a self might look like, however, remains beyond the human imaginary of their time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In light of this revelation Cahun\u2019s statement, \u201cUnder this mask, another mask. I will never finish removing all these faces,\u201d reveals another meaning: the exhaustion brought about by the interminable labor of self-determination. Cahun will never catch up with the damage done by once having tried to find their way by norms of recognition. Carefully assembled for survival in the social world, Cahun\u2019s masks are not solely cultural symbols that circulate outside in the social world of signs but penetrate within, parading across the plaza of the conscience in place of the true self. Try as one might, surface cannot be scrubbed from substance. As Cahun states, \u201cYou apply your mask too heavily, and it bites your skin. . . . You realize with horror that the flesh and its cover have become inseparable. Quick, a little saliva; you reglue the bandage to the wound.\u201d56<\/a><\/sup> Here the slippage between bandage and mask, self and wound, is telling of the trans experience. Gender performance is not merely a thing of theatrics and play but a means of survival which forever alters \u201cthe unique unnamable\u201d self.57<\/a><\/sup> The always-already quality of the mask that both wounds and bandages indicates the precarity implicated in Butler\u2019s theory of gender performativity: the fact that one is born into a gendered order not of one\u2019s choosing by which one must abide to gain the support necessary to sustain human life.58<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n

To engage in surgical self-discovery that peels away the bandage-mask is to reveal a fragmented, nonhuman soul ravaged by its own carnival masks. What Do You Want from Me?<\/em> (Que me veux-tu?<\/em>), a composite version of the untitled 1920 portraits, manifests the impossible \u201cflayed face\u201d of Cahun\u2019s interiority. Finally shorn of every accrued affectation and gendered signifier, Cahun\u2019s self is unrecognizable by frameworks for human life. Cahun gains no power through the loss of gender signifiers. Their shaved head and nude torso represent power and identity commonly stripped from prisoners and the institutionalized. The paired front and side views evoke the police mug shot. The merged torsos are suggestive of conjoined twins, who were subjects of popular and medical fascination during the era. All of these suggestions reference a loss of power by those ejected from frameworks of the human.59<\/a><\/sup> However, as bodies photographically superimposed upon one another, Cahun\u2019s self-image is also an impossible human\u2014a figment of the psyche who cannot exist in the somatic world. It is the darkroom that allows Cahun to finally meet themself. Cahun\u2019s faces simultaneously examine and avoid each other. They find themselves stuck together yet unable to recognize one another. As the title suggests, the longed-for encounter with the soul is an unwelcome intrusion. The composite image reveals the stakes of recognition for the trans nonbinary subject. On the interior side of such a failure of recognition is the fact that those who cannot settle into male or female subjectivity, lacking language or images to describe such people, come to believe they are impossible and mad. On the exterior side of this failure of recognition, those who fail to pass as male or female are jettisoned from the realm of the human. This utter failure renders the wound and bandage mask as one and the same.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Their theorization of gender utilizes the limits of photographic technology to speak to the limits of the body to make apparent one\u2019s sense of self. Even a \u201cstraight\u201d photograph constructs that which it appears only to record as natural fact\u2014subjected to so many cuts in the process of making that its relationship to any factual reality is profoundly tenuous.60<\/a><\/sup> Cahun\u2019s use of photography draws parallels between the fallibility of the photograph\u2019s indexical function and the body\u2019s. Mangling facts, fictions, bodies, and genders to stretch the elasticity of photography to its limit\u2014its inescapable tie to the visible\u2014Cahun points to the limits of the body to make visible the sense of a self for whom any externalization invites the diagnostic gaze. They sentence that gendered surface of the body to death by guillotine mirror. \u201cWhat would be the use of pulling the lid off such mysteries?\u201d Cahun asks. \u201cSo that the mechanism appears? Too late for us, body and soul beyond repair.\u201d Every time we think we have seen it, it turns out again that our belated gaze meets mere surface, \u201cuseless as Mona Lisa\u2019s smile, trompe l\u2019oeil<\/em> painting. Impenetrable facade.\u201d61<\/a><\/sup> Even a proliferation of discourse to make the self legible\u2014\u201ctruths that stick out a mile\u201d\u2014can only form an illusory self-image \u201cpainted in trompe l\u2019\u00e2me<\/em>.\u201d62<\/a><\/sup> Such an image tricks not the eye, but the soul (l\u2019\u00e2me<\/em>).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/div>\n\n\n\n
\"A
Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, Untitled<\/em>, ca. 1920, gelatin silver print, 8\u215c x 4\u215e in. (21.0 x 12.4\u2009cm). Jersey Heritage Collections, St. Helier, Jersey (artwork \u00a9 Claude Cahun; photograph provided by the Jersey Heritage Collections)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
<\/div>\n\n\n\n

Trans on This Side of the Overthrow<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

In distinction from the transnormalizing effects of 1950s transsexual medicine, Cahun and Moore\u2019s cuts with the guillotine mirror are not invested in mainstream cultural legibility for trans subjects. They theorize the potential of the gender-nonconforming subject to rupture the bounds by which human life is defined, anticipating trans as a political identity of radical illegibility distinct from diagnostic discourses. Cahun and Moore forge a precedence for the notion that \u201ctrans\u201d might signify not so much a complex space between \u201cman\u201d and \u201cwoman\u201d but instead the space between the body and the biopolitical state\u2014from which profoundly new possibilities for social life materialize.63<\/a><\/sup> Cahun is anything but the \u201cgood transsexual\u201d upon which transsexual medicine and the normalized \u201cspectacular whiteness\u201d of trans identities would be built after the war.64<\/a><\/sup> Instead, Cahun believed they had a revolutionary duty to \u201cembody my own revolt\u201d as a contribution to struggles against patriarchal power.65<\/a><\/sup> By living the political revolt of the revolting (r\u00e9voltant<\/em>), Cahun and Moore claimed a space for recognition for the unrecognizable.66<\/a><\/sup> Their photographs theorize trans embodiment as a wrench in the registers of biopolitical power.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

However, rather than narrate Cahun and Moore into a \u201ctrans-before-trans\u201d origin teleology, identifying their gender as politicized necessitates situating them within the turn toward public legibility of contemporary trans identities, which was achieved by negating correlations between white transsexuals and gender variance in Black and Indigenous peoples.67<\/a><\/sup> b. binaohan points out that the politicization of trans identity that arose in the 1990s in distinction from medical discourse mirrored the same colonial history of gender variance.68<\/a><\/sup> \u201cNew\u201d white, middle-class, trans politics proved hostile to and ignorant of political organizing by trans women of color. binoahan cautions against the articulation of a coherent historical trans community because of the incessant potential to recreate terms of recognition that exclude trans women of color from frameworks of the human.69<\/a><\/sup> The legitimized public visibility of white subjects who \u201cinvent\u201d transsexuality and its politicization creates a temporal facade by which white trans histories appear to precede Black and Indigenous histories in what C. Riley Snorton identifies as another iteration of Homi Bhabha\u2019s concept of colonial-mimicry narratives. By continually displacing colonial subjects as behind whites, nonwhites are produced in public discourse as a parroting Other.70<\/a><\/sup> Writing whites into trans history as protopoliticized nonbinary trans subjects risks substantiating such chronobiopolitical illusions\u2014the kind of trompe l\u2019\u00e2me<\/em> masquerading as \u201ctruths that stick out a mile\u201d against which Cahun warned.71<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n

We might thus situate the backward feeling touch between Cahun and 1990s trans and lesbian cultures as arm-in-arm skips back and forth across a selfsame void\u2014that fraught colonial fabric within which gender freedoms are selectively doled out as a racial privilege\u2014rather than as a reach across two voids temporally separated by the advent of transsexuality. In fact, Cahun appears to situate their embodied revolt in a present unbroken from our own:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I had always admitted that in a new world there would no longer be a place for iconoclasts of my kind and not being able to glimpse what future would be waiting for me on the other side of the overthrow . . . my role was to embody my own revolt and to accept, at the proper moment, my destiny whatever it may be.72<\/a><\/sup><\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

The politics of Cahun\u2019s gendered life are so relentlessly emergent that they readily anticipate their own undoing. They foresee the successful outcome of their embodied noncompliance as the eradication of the bourgeois entitlement which permitted their public life as a \u201cbizarre\u201d gender misfit in the first place. With such a destiny still unrealized, Cahun therefore suggests that we occupy this \u201cside of the overthrow\u201d with them\u2014feeling backward for something irrevocably lost\u2014rather than that today\u2019s nonbinary trans identities actualize Cahun\u2019s desired future of freedoms not yet imaginable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is made strikingly apparent in twenty-first-century celebrations of Cahun\u2019s gender transgressions within Israel and Israeli-funded art institutions that pinkwash queerness as exemplary of the gender freedoms protected by the settler-colonial nation against the backdrop of Palestinian dispossession and genocide.73<\/a><\/sup> While contemporary frameworks for acceptance of trans people appear to expand the definitions of human life, they must be situated within increased global precarity that in fact suggests the valuation of human life narrows when the nation-state lays claim to gender\u2019s temporal \u201cprogress.\u201d74<\/a><\/sup> That Cahun lost their life to the fight against genocide demonstrates that twenty-first-century legibility is not the resolution they sought but another trick, requiring more exhaustive mask-scrubbing labor. What (unending) end have Cahun and Moore yet to meet in the backward emergence of trans liberation?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/div>\n\n\n\n

Jordan Reznick<\/strong> <\/a>is a Getty\/National Endowment for the Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow at the Getty Research Institute. They are working on a book project entitled \u201cLanding the Camera: Indigenous Ecologies and Photographic Technologies in the West.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/div>\n\n\n\n

I thank Tirza True Latimer, Micah Bazant, and Julian Carter for their insights, feedback, and support. I am also indebted to the anonymous reviewer who discovered a latent field of possibility waiting to be pulled to the surface of the text.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n

<\/div>
  1. Abigail Solomon-Godeau, \u201cThe Equivocal \u2018I\u2019: Claude Cahun as Lesbian Subject,\u201d in Inverted Odysseys: Claude Cahun, Maya Deren, Cindy Sherman<\/em>, ed. Shelley Rice (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), 111\u201326; and Tirza True Latimer, Women Together\/Women Apart: Portraits of Lesbian Paris<\/em> (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005). ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  2. Tirza True Latimer, \u201c\u2018Le Masque Verbal\u2019: Le Travestisme Textuel de Claude Cahun,\u201d in Claude Cahun<\/em>, ed. Juan Vicente Aliaga and Fran\u00e7ois Leperlier (Paris: \u00c9ditions Hazan, 2011), 81\u201382. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  3. Christy Wampole, \u201cThe Impudence of Claude Cahun,\u201d L\u2019esprit cr\u00e9ateur<\/em> 53, no. 1 (Spring 2013): 101\u20134. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  4. Susan Stryker, Transgender History: The Roots of Today\u2019s Revolution<\/em>, 2nd ed. (New York: Seal Press, 2017), 45\u201346; and Julian Gill-Peterson, Histories of the Transgender Child<\/em> (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018), 8\u201316. For examples of trans and nonbinary historical figures and methodologies for identifying them, see Judith Halberstam, Female Masculinity<\/em> (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998); Carolyn Dinshaw, Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre- and Postmodern<\/em> (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 106\u201312; Rebekah Edwards, \u201c\u2018This Is Not a Girl\u2019: A Trans* Archival Reading,\u201d Transgender Studies Quarterly<\/em> 2, no. 4 (November 2015): 650\u201365; Leah DeVun and Zeb Tortorici, \u201cTrans, Time, and History,\u201d Transgender Studies Quarterly<\/em> 5, no. 4 (November 2018): 518\u201339; Julian Gill-Peterson, \u201cTrans of Color Critique Before Transsexuality,\u201d Transgender Studies Quarterly<\/em> 5, no. 4 (November 2018): 606\u201320; and Allison Surtees and Jennifer Dyer, eds., Exploring Gender Diversity in the Ancient World<\/em> (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020). ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  5. Gill-Peterson, Transgender Child<\/em>, 10; Edwards, \u201c\u2018This Is Not a Girl,\u2019\u201d 653. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  6. Robert Mills, \u201cVisibly Trans? Picturing Saint Eugenia in Medieval Art,\u201d Transgender Studies Quarterly<\/em> 5, no. 4 (November 2018): 541. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  7. Claude Cahun, Disavowals; Or, Cancelled Confessions<\/em>, trans. Susan de Muth (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), 151\u201352, 200. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  8. Dinshaw, Getting Medieval<\/em>, 106. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  9. This queer archaeological method is suggested in Halberstam, Female Masculinity<\/em>, 50\u201351; and Heather Love, \u201cSpoiled Identity: Stephen Gordon\u2019s Loneliness and the Difficulties of Queer History,\u201d GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies<\/em> 7, no. 4 (2001): 487\u2013519. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  10. Cahun, Disavowals<\/em>, 12. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  11. Ibid., 102\u20133. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  12. Latimer believes Cahun was introduced to Havelock Ellis\u2019s Psychology of Sex<\/em> while volunteering at Sylvia Beach\u2019s bookshop in Paris, where Beach displayed all six volumes prominently (Latimer, Women Together<\/em>, 9\u201317). In France the name \u201cClaude\u201d is used for both men and women, while \u201cMarcel\u201d is typical for men; they adopted the names \u201cClaude Cahun\u201dand \u201cMarcel Moore\u201d as teenagers during the same period that Cahun\u2019s personal snapshots show they began to shave their head and reject feminine attire; see Jennifer L. Shaw, Exist Otherwise: The Life and Works of Claude Cahun<\/em> (London: Reaktion, 2017), 26. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  13. Latimer, Women Together<\/em>, 26\u201328. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  14. Fran\u00e7ois Leperlier, Claude Cahun: L\u2019exotisme int\u00e9rieur<\/em> (Paris: Fayard, 2006), 219\u201320, 247 (emphasis in original). ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  15.  Ibid., 377\u201380. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  16. DeVun and Tortorici, \u201cTrans, Time, and History,\u201d 518\u201339; and Carolyn Dinshaw, Lee Edelman, Roderick A. Ferguson, Carla Freccero, Elizabeth Freeman, Judith Halberstam, Annamarie Jagose, Christopher Nealon, and Nguyen Tan Hoang, \u201cTheorizing Queer Temporalities: A Roundtable Discussion,\u201d GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies<\/em> 13, nos. 2\u20133 (2007): 177\u201395. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  17. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity<\/em> (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 6, 17\u201318. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  18. Love, \u201c\u2018\u2018Spoiled Identity,\u2019\u201d 496\u201397. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  19. Latimer, Women Together<\/em>, 1 (emphasis in original). ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  20. Ibid., 1 ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  21. Jennifer Blessing, Rrose Is a Rrose Is a Rrose: Gender Performance in Photography<\/em> (New York: Guggenheim Museum, 1997). In a conversation with Micah Bazant, they stated that though it is difficult to estimate the distribution of the zine because of its reproduction and distribution by readers, Bazant estimates that a minimum of 2,000 paper copies were distributed in the first decade after its publication. By 2010 TimTum<\/em> became available on the QZAP Zine Archive online, where it continues to gain a following; see https:\/\/archive.qzap.org\/index.php\/Detail\/Object\/Show\/object_id\/408<\/a>. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  22. Micah Bazant, TimTum: A Trans Jew Zine<\/em> (n.p.: printed by the author, 1999). ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  23. Ibid. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  24. Ibid.; and Rosalind E. Krauss, Bachelors<\/em> (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), 42. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  25. Bazant, TimTum<\/em> (emphasis in original). ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  26. Benjamin T. Singer, \u201cTrans Art in the 1990s: A 2001 Interview with Jordy Jones,\u201d Transgender Studies Quarterly<\/em> 1, no. 4 (November 2014): 620\u201326. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  27. Cahun, Disavowals<\/em>, 151\u201352; this translation is suggested by Latimer, Women Together<\/em>, 101. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  28. Danielle Knafo, In Her Own Image: Women\u2019s Self-Representation in Twentieth-Century Art<\/em> (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2009), 56. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  29. Gill-Peterson, Transgender Child<\/em>, 11\u201313; and Jay Prosser, Second Skins: The Body Narratives of Transsexuality<\/em> (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 7\u20139. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  30. Susan Stryker and Aren Z. Aizura, \u201cIntroduction,\u201d in The Transgender Studies Reader 2<\/em>, ed. Stryker and Aizura (New York: Routledge, 2013), 6. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  31. For example, Shaw, Exist Otherwise<\/em>, 67\u201372; and Havelock Ellis, La Femme dans la soci\u00e9t\u00e9<\/em>, vol. 1, L\u2019hygi\u00e8ne social: \u00c9tudes de psychologie sociale<\/em>, trans. Lucy Schwob (Paris: Mercure de France, 1929). Cahun also translated volume 2 of Ellis\u2019s text, but it was never published (Latimer, Women Together<\/em>, 171n64). ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  32. Prosser, Second Skins,<\/em> 135\u201355. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  33. Havelock Ellis, Psychology of Sex: A Manual for Students<\/em> (London: William Heinemann, 1933), 195\u201396. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  34. Prosser, Second Skins<\/em>, 139\u201352. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  35. Gill-Peterson, \u201cTrans of Color Critique\u201d; and Kadji Amin, \u201cGlands, Eugenics, and Rejuvenation in Man into Woman: A Biopolitical Genealogy of Transsexuality,\u201d Transgender Studies Quarterly<\/em> 5, no. 4 (November 2018): 589\u2013605. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  36. Cited in Shaw, Exist Otherwise<\/em>, 31\u201332. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  37. Quoted in Prosser, Second Skins<\/em>, 143. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  38. Ibid., 143. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  39. Elizabeth Freeman, Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories<\/em> (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 61\u201363. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  40. On the conception of queerness and its affects as turning back to look at history while looking forward toward a better future, see Heather Love, Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History<\/em> (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  41. Cahun, Disavowals<\/em>, 195. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  42. Ibid., 191. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  43. Walter Benjamin, \u201cThe Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,\u201d in Photography in Print: Writings from 1816 to the Present<\/em>, ed. Vicki Goldberg (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1981), 319\u201334. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  44. Cahun, Disavowals<\/em>, 201. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  45. Julia Temple Newhook, Jake Pyne, Kelley Winters, Stephen Feder, Cindy Holmes, Jemma Tosh, Mari-Lynne Sinnott, Ally Jamieson, and Sarah Pickett, \u201cA Critical Commentary on Follow-Up Studies and \u2018Desistance\u2019 Theories about Transgender and Gender-Nonconforming Children,\u201d International Journal of Transgenderism<\/em> 19, no. 2 (April 2018): 212\u201324. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  46. Cahun, Disavowals<\/em>, 51\u201352. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  47. Ibid., 200. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  48. Ibid., 30. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  49. Ibid. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  50. Susan Stryker, Paisley Currah, and Lisa Jean Moore, \u201cTrans-, Trans, or Transgender?,\u201d Women\u2019s Studies Quarterly<\/em> 36, nos. 3\u20134 (2008): 12. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  51. Cahun, Disavowals<\/em>, 25. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  52.  Claude Cahun, \u201cCarnaval en chambre\u201d (Bedroom carnival), Ligne de Coeur<\/em> 4 (March 1926); translated and reprinted in Shaw, Exist Otherwise<\/em>, 284\u201386. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  53. Shaw, Exist Otherwise<\/em>, 284\u201385. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  54.  Judith Butler, \u201cPerformative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory,\u201d Theatre Journal<\/em> 40, no. 4 (December 1988): 519\u201331. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  55. Freeman, Time Binds<\/em>, 63. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  56. Claude Cahun, \u201cCarnaval en chambre,\u201d 285. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  57. Cahun, Disavowals<\/em>, 203\u20134. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  58. Judith Butler, Undoing Gender<\/em> (New York: Routledge, 2004), 17\u201328. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  59. Judith Butler, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable?<\/em> (London: Verso, 2009). ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  60. John Tagg, The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories<\/em> (Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan Education, 1988). ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  61. Cahun, \u201cCarnaval en chambre,\u201d 286. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  62. Cahun, Disavowals<\/em>, 201. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  63. Stryker, Currah, and Moore, \u201cTrans-, Trans, or Transgender?,\u201d 14. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  64. Emily Skidmore, \u201cConstructing the \u2018Good Transsexual\u2019: Christine Jorgensen, Whiteness, and Heteronormativity in the Mid-Twentieth Century Press,\u201d Feminist Studies<\/em> 37, no. 2 (Summer 2011): 270\u2013300; and Susan Stryker, \u201cWe Who Are Sexy<\/em>: Christine Jorgensen\u2019s Transsexual Whiteness in the Postcolonial Philippines,\u201d Social Semiotics<\/em> 19, no. 1 (2009): 80. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  65. Quoted in Leperlier, Claude Cahun,<\/em> 579. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  66. Butler, Frames of War<\/em>. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  67. See C. Riley Snorton, Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity<\/em> (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), 139\u201375; and b. binoahan, decolonizing trans\/gender 101<\/em> (Toronto: Biyuto Publishing, 2014), 69\u201373. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  68. binaohan, decolonizing<\/em>, 70\u201373; see also Che Gossett and Juliana Huxtable, \u201cExisting in the World: Blackness at the Edge of Trans Visibility,\u201d in Trap Door: Trans Cultural Production and the Politics of Visibility<\/em>, ed. Reina Gossett, Eric A. Stanley, and Johanna Burton (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017), 42\u201343. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  69. binaohan, decolonizing<\/em>, 70\u201373; see also Amin, \u201cGlands, Eugenics, and Rejuvenation.\u201d ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  70. Snorton, Black on Both Sides<\/em>, 157; and Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture<\/em> (London: Routledge, 1994), 85\u201392. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  71. On chronobiopolitics, see Freeman, Time Binds<\/em>, 3. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  72. Quoted in Leperlier, Claude Cahun<\/em>, 579. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  73. See, for example, Forbidden Junctions and Back to the Canon: Claude Cahun\u2019s Portrait Photographs<\/em>, exhibition, Israeli Center for Digital Art, Holon, 2008; and Show Me as I Want to Be Seen<\/em>, exhibition, Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco, 2019. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  74. Snorton, Black on Both Sides<\/em>, 7, 143. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li><\/ol><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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