Writer, Juliet Jacques: There’s a lot of power and resistance in refusing to use the body entirely in the way that Cahun does in their photomontages.
I’m Juliet Jacques. I am a writer and filmmaker based in London. You are looking at a photomontage of self-portraits by the French artist, Claude Cahun, entitled M.R.M (Sex). Claude Cahun was born in 1894 into a family of prominent Jewish intellectuals, and began making photomontages in 1912, when they were 18.
M.R.M was published as one of the illustrations in Cahun’s book, Aveux non Avenus, which has been translated variously as Denials or Disavowals or Canceled Confessions. It’s an autobiographical text exploring Cahun’s own identity in terms of gender and sexuality, but also this sense of a complex and fragmented personhood.
Cahun actually wrote, “Masculine, feminine, it depends on the situation. Neuter is the only gender that always suits me.”
You see this playing with the possibilities of gender expression that are kind of funny, sometimes melancholic, but are very emotionally complicated and do really speak to a sense of sometimes being trapped by the confines of gender and sometimes finding these very playful and beautiful ways to break out of it.