"Tout Ces Visages": Masquerade in the Self-Portraiture of Claude Cahun

Abstract

From 1912 until her death in 1954, French artist Claude Cahun (1894-1954) produced a series of self-portraits that interrogated and challenged traditional social assumptions about gender, sexuality, and identity more broadly. Cahun photographed herself embodying diverse, carefully-constructed, and often contradictory roles/“- selves.” In this paper I analyze the way performance, disguise, and masquerade function in Cahun’s self-portraiture. I argue that Cahun’s masquerading “selves” explore the complexities and nuances of identity and enable Cahun to challenge and reimagine female subjectivity, gender identity, sexuality, and patriarchal ways of seeing.