Autofiction and Self-Portraiture: Jenny Diski and Claude Cahun

This chapter argues that the contemporary British writer Jenny Diski and the Modernist French photographer and writer Claude Cahun are both literary self-portraitists, as this term is defined by Michel Beaujour. This is evident in their similar approaches to the themes of masquerade, narcissism, and naming. By reading Diski’s The Dream Mistress and Cahun’s Disavowals in the light of Julia Kristeva’s account of narcissism, as well as theories of autofiction and self-portraiture, the chapter further contends that self-portraiture arises from a distinct conception of the self, and of the psychological origins of artistic creativity. On this basis, it can be contrasted with autofiction, and autofiction and self-portraiture can then be seen to be related to each other as the two poles of contemporary life-writing.

The Documentaries of Barbara Hammer: Lesbian Creativity, Kinship, and Erotic Pleasure in the Historical Margins

Lesbian filmmaker Barbara Hammer turned from experimental filmmaking to feature-length documentaries in the early 1990s. These late documentaries illustrate her distinct perspective on queer history and affect, which was influenced by 1970s lesbian feminism and queer scholarship in the 1980s and 1990s. Her structure and style in these films draw on the tools of both conventional historical documentaries and experimental film. Offering an astonishing range of evidence, Hammer creatively presents queer plenty from the margins of the archive. Through this evidence, Hammer affirms past queer lives, celebrating and highlighting rebelliousness, agency, creativity, queer kinship, and passion. Additionally, Hammer attempts to communicate with and embody the past, physically and emotionally seeking out and feeling the interior and exterior lives of her biographical subjects, who are predominantly creative women, including the poet Elizabeth Bishop, the Dada artist Hannah Höch, the surreal photographer Claude Cahun, and the painter Nicole Eisenman.

A Dialogue with Claude Cahun: Between Writing, Photography and Film in Magic Mirror and Confessions to the Mirror

In this chapter, the artist filmmaker Sarah Pucill elucidates her artistic dialogue with the Surrealist lesbian artist Claude Cahun (1894-1954), whose photographs and manuscripts are constitutive of her films Magic Mirror (2013) and Confessions to the Mirror (2016). Pursuing Pucill’s earlier interest in the intersubjectivity between women, the films re-enact Cahun’s photographs in the form of tableaux vivants, creating new connections between the French artist’s visual and written work and Pucill’s own creative practice. Drawing on Ágnes Pethő’s theoretical writing on the intermediality of the tableau vivant in film, the artist analyses how her re-enactment of Cahun’s photographs as tableaux vivants creates a sense of indecipherability caused by the overlaying of the original ‘ghost’ photograph with its re-staging in colour and with sound. The reworkings of Cahun's texts and photographs in the films conjoin different art forms and authors, interrogating questions of queer female subjectivity across time and space.

Them and the Timbre of Gender

Inspired by a question—“Trans singers exist, but what would we do with them?”—Marchand Knight, a classically trained soprano, began composing Them, an opera based on the lives of genderqueer artists Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore. These questions emerged as central to the piece: Does gender have a timbre? What are the semiotics of gender that are implicitly (or explicitly) embedded in operatic composition by librettists and composers, and how can they be used or dismantled in this work? How has the taming of the classical voice by the German Fach system stymied Western awareness of what falls outside the box? Through a combination of secondary and primary source research on opera culture, voice science and training methodologies, aesthetics, timbre perception, and gender semiotics, Marchand Knight and Marchand challenge the notion of gendered voices by looking at sounds praised outside of white, Eurocentric, patriarchal, classical vocal pedagogies.