ABSTRACT
The majority of articles in this book have focused on populations that have migrated as a result of political or economic conditions, seeking greater opportunities or freedom from ethnic, racial, or religious persecution. This chapter analyzes the circumstances surrounding the lives and exhibition history of two artists who reveled in the “in between,” the liminal spaces between genders, cultures, languages, and nations. In addition, this chapter deviates somewhat from the scholarly conventions of earlier chapters; it is more self-reflexive in nature, selective in its scope, and at the same time, diffusive in its focus. Self-scrutiny is necessary because I intend to discuss the ways in which traditionally accepted methodologies (including my own) need to be reassessed in light of evolving definitions and metaphors of migration. The scope is selective in that I choose only three sites for the artists’ work: a gallery at the Wellcome Collection in London; an exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago (AIC); as well as its physical and digital “home” at Jersey Heritage. And finally, the emphasis is diffuse because I am interested in how Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore chose multiple forms of exile and migrancy as well as in how those choices have affected their posthumous reception. Like the women who are my subject, I am deliberately challenging practices that privilege genres and methods developed by white males who use these conventions to claim a certain objectivity. To refer back to the research by Andrew Dewdney and Victoria Walsh that I described in the introduction to the first section of this volume, I am using “method as a performative tool of change” (2015, 1). I do not pretend to be objective any more than I intend to offer a unified, straightforward argument. Follow me if you will; it’s a journey, a migration.
