Claude Cahun's Curiosity
Date and Time
Location
FRANCE AND THE WORLD
SPEAKER: Hannah Freed-Thall, New York University
Abstract: 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.
About the Speaker
Hannah Freed-Thall is Professor of French Literature, Thought and Culture at NYU. She is the author of Spoiled Distinctions: Aesthetics and the Ordinary in French Modernism (Oxford UP, 2015), which was awarded the Scaglione Prize for French & Francophone Studies and the Modernist Studies Association Prize for a First Book, and Modernism at the Beach: Queer Ecologies and the Coastal Commons (Columbia UP, 2023), which received the Modernist Studies Association Book Prize.