Claude Cahun’s Self-Portrait

Looking into the mirror of the future

This arresting photograph was taken in 1928.  It shows Claude Cahun, who was born Lucy Schwob in 1894, and wrote: “Neuter is the only gender that always suits me”.  

I find I am compelled to speak to this self-portrait: I have so many questions.

Self-Portrait by Claude Cahun, 1928

Claude, you are looking at the camera but your reflection gazes into the future. 

In 1928, the year you and your lover made this photograph of you, a book came out that you might have known called The Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall.  It set the public image of lesbians for decades as tragic, lonely victims of fate.  Virginia Woolf offered an alternative in the same year with her Orlando’s delightful, easy games of skipping across from she to he.  But what did you think about this?

You changed your name from Lucy to Claude.  You gave up your last name, too, when being known as the niece of the famous author Marcel Schwob might have helped your career as a writer.  In the end, you used your literary gifts to undermine the Nazi occupation of Jersey, but that’s a sad story, as well as an exceptionally brave one, and this picture of you was taken long before all of that.

That shirt, Claude!  What is it doing in the 1920s?  Who, then, wore outsized shirts borrowed from menswear?  We did that in the 1980s, and now there are ‘boyfriend’ jeans.  You are the boyfriend, here, Claude, but there is a hesitant feminine cast to your eyes and your mouth is smooth and almost pursed.  Perhaps you are even wearing lipstick?

Your reflection gazes somewhere very far off.  Can it see as far as the 2020s?  I believe it can.  I believe it sees us now, 100 years forward in time and still struggling to separate sex and gender: the body and the social role.  I want you to know that now it’s possible to choose a body that you weren’t born with, but it isn’t easy.  What is?

To be a woman without a man, or to be woman-partnered, still takes courage although not, in some places, as much as it did when you lived it.  How can I know how it was for you, living between genders in the way you show us here?  You don’t repeat the ‘man trapped in a woman’s body’ idea of your time by adopting full male clothing, despite the stiff-collared shirt and the cropped hair.  Instead, the smoothness of your skin and the hint of lipstick is definitively feminine.  Is this uncertainty what you were aiming at?

Your challenging gaze holds me, Claude: you are sending out an appeal.  You cannot see your reflection and you are asking me what I see you when I look at it.  Well, it’s this: the butch shirt, the boyish look and the made-up lips are all quite usual now and, if not accepted everywhere, many like you have decided to insert themselves in between our artificial camps of masculine and feminine.

I look back with empathy, and send you good thoughts.  Once again, I am astounded that an artist can leap across time and land in the future, looking entirely modern.  You do not have defiance in your eyes.  Instead, they contain a hundred questions about the reflection behind you.  Here are my guesses about what those questions are: Must I be feminine if I am a woman?  When will it be possible to be something beyond masculine or feminine?  Do you judge me?  Do you recognise me?  Can you look me in the eye without feeling uncomfortable?  Do I want you to feel uncomfortable?  Am I beautiful?  Should I be wearing this shirt, just because I want to?  Why do you think I have cut my hair short? Will my life be ruined if I live as a man?

So many questions.  Your art and writing – the existence of it, the genius of it—goes some way towards answering them.  If I could, Claude, I would reach out my hand and draw you into my time.  It’s not all good, and in some places you would not be safe, but I think you would find your tribe and find sustenance in the recent history of celebrating so many differences among us.  Welcome!

If you are on Substack, you might like to know that I posted a Note every weekday last week with one of Claude Cahun’s images, plus some discussion and a bit of background.

I’ve collected them together in one post here.