Disavowals
Subtitle: or, cancelled confessions
By: Claude Cahun ; preface by Pierre Mac Orlan ; introduction by Jennifer Mundy ; afterword by Francois Leperlier ; translated by Susan de Muth ; translators notes by Susan de Muth and Agnes Lhermitte.
Contributors: Malherbe, Suzanne, 1892-1972.
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: 2007
Place of publication: Cambridge, Mass
Language: eng
Number of pages: 226
ISBN-13: 9780262533034
Subjects: Cahun, Claude, -- 1894-1954; Photography, Artistic; Women photographers; Women authors
Other titles: Cancelled confessions
Work titles: Aveux non avenus
Description: "Claude Cahun (1894-1954), born Lucy Schwob, was a poet, performer, resistance fighter, prisoner, Surrealist, "constructor and explorer of objects," photographer, and "queer freak" who invented her life by flaunting the interchangability of roles and playing with the ambivalence of identity. Whether feigning vulnerability on the arm of her lover and stepsister Suzanne Malherbe aka Marcel Moore ("the other me"), making theatrical public appearances in disguise (sailor, gymnast, gypsy), or making herself up (vampire, Buddha, mannequin, angel) for self-portraits and installations, she rendered opposites inoperative and exposed the thinness of gender and power constructs by reducing them to mere surface costumes." "In May 1930, Editions Carrefour of Paris published 500 copies of a book called Aveux non Avenus, in which Cahun explored these same dialectics in book form. It is the nearest thing to a memoir Cahun wrote, but in fact the book is an anti-memoir, a critique of autobiography, where she uses subversive photomontages and statements to present herself as a force of genius possessed of the need to resist identification and to maintain within herself "the mania of the exception." Disavowals is the first appearance of that work, widely considered to be her most important text, in English."--BOOK JACKET.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references.