Abstract
An iconic photograph by the French surrealist artist Claude Cahun (née Lucy Schwob, 1894–1954) prompts reflections on the status of what might be called the ‘geometric turn’ in feminist modernism. The 1928 self-portrait (see Fig. 7.1), staged with the help of Cahun’s lover and stepsister Suzanne Moore (née Suzanne Malherbe), has become increasingly familiar in galleries and art publications since the mid-1990s, adorning, for example, the cover of the catalogue for a 1997 show at the Guggenheim Museum in New York entitled Rrose is a Rrose is a Rrose: Gender Performance in Photography. Most striking is the subject’s stance in front of the mirror — reflected, yet looking away — as if in direct defiance of the codes of female narcissism that mandate frontal self-contemplation. ‘Hermaphrodite can visit the house of Narcissus — and introduce himself there on my behalf,’ Cahun wrote in her book Heroines (1925).1
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Notes
Claude Cahun, Heroines, trans. Norman MacAfee, in Shelley Rice (ed.), Inverted Odysseys: Claude Cahun, Maya Deren, Cindy Sherman (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), p. 90.
Tirza True Latimer, ‘Looking Like a Lesbian: Portraiture and Sexual Identity in 1920s Paris’, in Whitney Chadwick and Tirza True Latimer (eds), The Modern Woman Revisited: Paris Between the Wars (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2003), pp. 127–43, this quotation p. 129.
Jacques Derrida, ‘Des Tours de Babel’, trans. Joseph F. Graham, in Acts of Religion, ed. Gil Anidjar (New York and London: Routledge, 2002), pp. 102–34, this quotation p. 119.
Marcel Proust, In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, trans. James Grieve (New York: Viking Penguin, 2002); cited by Peter Brooks in his review essay ‘The Shape of Time’, New York Times, 25 January 2004.
Jacques Lacan, Encore: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, XX, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998), p. 136.
Anne Anlin Cheng, Second Skin: Josephine Baker and the Modern Surface (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 8.
L. Bruder in Formes et vie (1951), cited in Mark Wigley, White Walls, Designer Dresses: The Fashioning of Modern Architecture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), p. 272.
Mary McLeod, ‘New Designs for Living: Domestic Equipment of Charlotte Perriand, Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret, 1928–29’, in Mary McLeod (ed.), Charlotte Perriand: An Art of Living (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2003), pp. 36–67. this auotation p. 43.
See Mary Louise Roberts, Civilization without Sexes: Reconstructing Gender in Postwar France, 1917–1927 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). Roberts takes Victor Margueritte’s novel La Garçonne (The Bachelor Girl, 1922) as a point of departure for analysing the post-war fashion for bobbed hair and drop-waist dresses that came to distinguish ‘modern woman’ and made her a model citizen of a ‘civilization without sexes’.
Laszló Munteán, ‘An Archeology of Camouflage’, MUTE, 25 July 2009, www.metamute.org/en/an_archeology_of_camouflage. The studies in question are False Colors: Art, Design and Modern Camouflage (2002) and Camoupedia: A Compendium of Research on Art, Architecture and Camouflage (2009).
Charlotte Perriand, cited in Roger Aujame, ‘Lessons from Objects: Perriand from the Pioneer Years to the “Epoch of Realities”’, in thuha McLeod (ed.), Charlotte Perriand, p. 156.
Claude Cahun, Écrits, ed. François Leperlier (Paris: Éditions Jean-Michel Place, 2002), p. 449 (my translation).
Rosalind Krauss, Bachelors (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), pp. 85, 89 and 88.
Cited by Peter Wollen, Addressing the Century: 100 Years of Art and Fashion (London: Hayward Gallery, 1998), p. 83.
Roland Barthes, The Neutral, trans. Denis Hollier and Rosalind Krauss (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), p. 188.
Catherine Malabou, Changing Difference: The Feminine and the Question of Philosophy, trans. Carolyn Shread (Cambridge: Polity, 2011), p. 33.
Catherine Malabou, Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing: Dialectic, Destruction, Deconstruction, trans. Carolyn Shread (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), p. 1.
Sylvia Lavin, Kissing Architecture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), p. 26.
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© 2012 Emily Apter
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Apter, E. (2012). Towards a Unisex Erotics: Claude Cahun and Geometric Modernism. In: Schaffner, A.K., Weller, S. (eds) Modernist Eroticisms. Palgrave Studies in Modern European Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137030306_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137030306_8
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