In yesterday’s installment of The Power Issue, Brian J. Smith waxed philosophical on the transformative power of acting.

For today’s edition, we’d like to take a look at French Surrealist Claude Cahun, who - though not an actor - used performance and manipulation of gender identity to dismantle popular notions of patriarchal society.

We actually don't even know what to call Cahun. Her possible titles could choke a horse: photographer, revolutionary, performer, novelist, prisoner...the list goes on. Of course, given the message of her work, it's only appropriate she lacks concise definition.

By showing the ethereal nature of gender, Cahun highlighted the interchangeability of gendered identities, thus reducing their importance in society to mere roles, rather than dominant truths. In some pictures Cahun appears androgynous, while in others she accentuates feminine characteristics, exploiting the gendered spectrum as a means of discrediting its validity. As for sexuality, Cahun certainly didn’t adhere to popular notions of sexual classification.

My opinion about homosexuality and homosexuals is exactly the same as my opinion about heterosexuality and heterosexuals. All depends on individuals and circumstances. I claim a general freedom of behavior.

Cahun's pursuit of this elusive general freedom brought her as much fame as it did trouble.

Find out what we mean, after the jump.

Born in Nantes, France to a wealthy newspaper family on October 25, 1894 as Lucy Schwob, Cahun grew up amidst the intelligentsia and moneyed leaders of France’s cultural elite.

Her uncle, Marcel Schwob made a name for himself with such works as Double Heart and Imaginary Lives, while her father owned a newspaper. Due to her mother’s severe mental imbalances, Cahun spent most of her young life in the care of her grandmother, Mathilde Cahun.

In 1919, at the age of 23, Cahun officially changed her name to Claude Cahun, intentionally choosing an androgynous identity to challenge heteronormative power. Using her body as a template of resistance, Cahun frequently dressed in costume, cementing her public identity as both an outside and an ever-changing chameleon. Later in life, after she had established herself as a transformative, performative artist and accompanying her illustration, “Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore”, Cahun commented:

Under this mask another mask. I shall never finish stripping away all these faces. And underneath all these masks, there is no ‘real’ identity.

While a chameleon changes its colors to disappear, Cahun changed her identity to stand out: a form of indirect action against assimilation. Through role reversal, gender bending and masquerading, Cahun worked to both dissect dismantle dominant social identities.

Cahun’s penchant for social and cultural defiance came in especially handy after her move to Paris in 1922. It was there – along with her step-sister and long-time lover, Suzanne Malherbe aka Marcel Moore – that Cahun fell in with The Surrealists: those purveyors of so-called true thought who used their work to achieve a greater social liberation.

At the time, Cahun produced a number of photographic self-portraits in which she assumed a multitude of identities, such as Buddha, Adam, a harlequin and a sailor. In addition, Cahun penned a series of monologues entitled Heroines in which she portrayed both historical and contemporary women, such as Helen and - not surprisingly – Sappho.

Cahun’s relationship with the Surrealists led her to join the Association of Revolutionary Writers and Artists and adhering to Leon Trotsky and surrealist leader Andre Breton’s Manifesto: Towards a Free Revolutionary Art. Written in 1938, the document foresees the eruption of World War II and urges artists to produce revolutionary pieces aimed at resisting the obliteration of culture all together. They write:

True art, which is not content to play variations on ready-made models but rather insists on expressing the inner needs of man and mankind in its time--true art is unable not to be revolutionary, not to aspire to a complete and radical reconstruction of society. This it must do, were it only to deliver intellectual creation from the chains that bind it, and to allow all mankind to raise itself to those heights, which only isolated geniuses have achieved in the past. We recognize that only the social revolution can sweep clear the path for a new culture…

At this point, Hitler had already taken power in Germany and had brought Austria under his thumb. Within a year Germany would invade Poland and World War II would bring fresh devastation to Europe, and a new wave of Cahun’s art.

By this point, Cahun and Moore had moved to an island off the coast of Normandy called Jersey. Despite the distance, Cahun maintained contact with her friends and Paris and soon joined the resistance movement against Germany. Fighting the rise of fascism in France, Cahun produced propaganda aimed at inciting mutiny among the Germany soldiers.

Infiltrating army rallies, Cahun and Moore strategically placed translations of anti-German BBC reports – sticking them in soldier’s pockets, on windshields and placing them in military files. Their efforts led to their 1944 arrest by the Gestapo and the women were sent to a death camp, where they were to be executed.

Luckily, the allied powers liberated the camp before the Germans enacted their revenge.

By this point, however, Cahun’s health had deteriorated and the couple moved back to Jersey, where Cahun died nine years later. Despite her prolific and radical work as a novelist and photographer, Cahun’s work gained less attention than many of her peers.

As gender studies reached new pinnacles in the 1990s, Cahun’s work gained new enthusiasts. More recently, a filmmaker named Barbara Hammer unveiled Love Other: The Story of Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore. In addition, Louise Downie just edited a collection of Cahun’s work: Don’t Kiss Me: The Art of Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore. As another world war seems to loom on the horizon, a revival of Cahun’s work and – more importantly – fight to demolish repressive power seems more puissant than ever.

For those of you who want more Claude Cahun, follow these links:
"Fame and Infamy" [Jersey Heritage Trust]
Claude Cahun [Wikipedia]
Claude Cahun: I am In Training, Don't Kiss Me [Vinland]