Juliet Jacques: My name is Juliet Jacques. I am a British writer and filmmaker. I've published a collection of short stories called Variations that explores the history of the trans and nonbinary community in the United Kingdom in a variety of different times and places.
Claude Cahun was constantly playing with gender and doing it through photography. The untitled self-portrait from roughly 1921 or 1922 has Cahun, with a shaved head, staring at the camera. By this point Cahun was quite experienced with self portraits, had been doing them for over a decade. But the portrait is something that would be read as very masculine.
It's something that you see throughout their creative work. This playing with the possibilities of gender expression that are kind of funny sometimes melancholic and this, portrait to me feels more melancholic than funny. But a very emotionally complicated sense of sometimes being trapped by the confines of gender and sometimes finding these very playful and peaceful ways to break out of it.
This work is in the book Aveux non Avenus, which has been translated variously as "denials" or "disavowals" or "cancelled confessions." Aveux non Avenus was published in 1930, but mostly written between 1919 and 1925.
It's quite hard book to summarize and categorize because it's very fragmentary. It's this mixture of photography and aphorisms and longer poetic passages. It doesn't have a formalized narrative. There's not really any sense of the narration going anywhere. It's an autobiographical text that explores the fragmented and complicated and somewhat chaotic nature of their own consciousness and what they are able to access.
I've just flipped to page 91 of the translation by Suzanne Demuth. And at the top of this page, Cahun writes:
Consciousness. The carver. My enthusiasms, my impulses, my little passions were irksome. . . . Come on, then. . . . By a process of elimination, what is necessary about me? . . . The material is badly cut. I want it to be straightened up. A clumsy snip with the scissors. Bach! Let's even it up on the other side. . . . A stain? We'll cover it up. Let's trim it again. I no longer exist. Perfect. Now nothing can come between us.
The affinity I felt with Cahun is because I ended up doing a lot of writing that got bracketed as confessional or sort of first-person autobiographical writing, in which you can get yourself into a situation where you're constantly expected to give away details about your personal life. And what I have always found really interesting about Cahun is the refusal of that trap—even as they are sort of circling it.
I was always looking for queer and trans writers and reading Claude Cahun's work gave me this kind of queer and gender non-conforming take on art that I thought always should have been there.