Claude Cahun's Curiosity

Hannah Freed-Thall (NYU) is giving a talk at the Mahindra Humanities Center's France and the World seminar, which is organized by RLL faculty, entitled "Claude Cahun's Curiosity".

This talk explores the anti-fascistic potential of curiosity, taking avant-garde artist Claude Cahun as a case study. In 1930, Cahun and their partner Marcel Moore published Cancelled Confessions — a genre-exploding anti-memoir, alt-Surrealist collage experiment, and visual-verbal remapping of the genderqueer body. In place of Surrealism’s libidinal fixation on woman-as-muse, Cancelled Confessions offers up trans/queer curiosity as its edgy, wayward ethos. Hannah Freed-Thall will discuss how Cahun and Moore’s fierce defiance still speaks to us today.