Through the Guillotine Mirror: Claude Cahun’s Theory of Trans against the Void

Abstract

During the 1990s art historians established Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore as lesbian Surrealists whose oeuvre of gender-transgressing photomontages anticipated feminist explorations of gender performativity. Meanwhile Cahun and Moore’s artworks also circulated underground in Timtum: A Trans Jew Zine, where activist artist Micah Bazant celebrated Cahun as an anti-fascist trans artist who lived a gendered embodiment as yet unnamed. Investigating this understudied history as cross-temporal “touch” whereby Cahun and Moore’s work influenced the shape of politicized trans nonbinary identities, this essay considers Cahun’s gender nonconformity both within their own historical context and within ours. I argue that not only did Cahun and Moore live trans lives, but that their artwork explicitly opposed the medical and psychological discourses of their era which sought to find the “truth” of binary gender inside the bodies and minds of trans and intersex subjects. Working at the limits of photographic indexicality in order to point to the limits of the body’s indexicality, they theorized trans embodiment as an evasion of chronobiopolitical legibility. These conclusions shed new light on contemporary exhibitions in which Cahun and Moore’s work stands for the gender freedoms protected by the liberal nation state.