ABSTRACT

Claude Cahun’s body of work gives her a singular place in the Surrealist movement, one at odds with male representations of Woman. Aveux non avenus a book written and illustrated in 1930 by Cahun is an autobiographical collection of poems, aphoristic philosophical fragments, and recollected dreams, all reflections on the identity and androgynous sexuality of their author. It is illustrated by a group of photomontages - again, self-portraits of and by Cahun, bodily displacements and rearrangements in which she manipulates and plays with the representation of her own subjectivity. Cahun participated in the Contre-Attaque group, which the Surrealists organized in response to the rise of Hitler and the spread of fascism in France. In 1936, with her stepsister and life-long companion, Suzanne Malherbe, Cahun moved from Paris to the Isle of Jersey, in the English Channel, where they had summered as children. Cahun was jailed for a time during this period.