Cahun: An Ovidian Tiresias for Modern Times

This chapter recuperates Claude Cahun as important in the French conception of Ovid. Largely overlooked in her own era, Cahun is enjoying somewhat of a renaissance, with her Wikipedia page identifying her as a ‘queer pioneer’. The work of Cahun, at turns a visual artist or a literary one, has rarely been studied as a cohesive œuvre. I (re)turn to her writings in a balanced approach that sees the text as a visual companion to the image and vice-versa, and within this analysis it is her text Héroïnes, and not the critically favoured Aveux non avenus, which acts as the pivotal literary complement to her photographic archive. Drawing on both Ovid’s Heroides and Metamorphoses, Cahun exploits the traditional literary form as well as the emerging medium of photography to add her own unique voice to Ovidian reception. Under this perspective, Cahun becomes a modern-day Tiresias, whose work encapsulates voices of the past and prefigures those of the future. Under her pivotal Tiresian gaze, Cahun advocates for the voice of the creative individual, freeing both herself and others from the binary restrictions of gender categorization.