ECR French Nineteenth-Century Art Network: “Queer Reflections: Reconstructing the Long Nineteenth Century's History of Homosexuality in Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore’s Vues et visions”

Weds 26 June 1700 (BST) / 1800 (CEST) / 1200 (EDT) / 0900 (PDT)

In 1919, Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore published their first collaborative project, Vues et visions. This small-run, collector’s edition book, written by Cahun and illustrated by Moore, is made up of 25 pairs of illustrated prose poems that link views of the Breton coastal town of Le Croisic in 1912 with visions of an ancient Greco-Roman past.  In this paper, I analyse the relationship the book proposes between past and present, looking at how it receives and reworks nineteenth-century narratives about the history of homosexuality that gave ancient Greece a place of honor. Where other queer authors at the turn of the century use this ancient past to solidify modern gay and lesbian identities, Cahun and Moore, I argue, use the same material to disturb the effects of the nineteenth century’s production of sexual categories, thereby challenging rather than reinforcing the cohesion of identity in their present and our own.

Speaker bio:

Hannah Frydman is an assistant professor of French Studies at the University of Washington where they research and teach on modern French history, literature, and culture, with an emphasis on gender, sexuality, economic life, mass culture, and archival methods. They are currently completing a book entitled Between the Sheets: Classified Advertising, Sexuality, and the Moral Threat to Press Freedom in France (under contract with Cornell University Press). Their work on classified advertising and sexuality has been published in Dix-Neuf, French Historical Studies,  Histoire, économie & société, Nineteenth-Century French Studies, and Public Books.