«Neutre est le seul genre qui me convienne»: rhetorics of androginy in Claude Cahun’s works

Abstract

The article deals with the rhetoric and discursive strategies through which surrealist artist and writer Clade Cahun elaborates forms of self-representations which, by subverting gender norms, reinvent non only femininity but humanity overall. The analysis will be carried out on the basis of Roland Barthes’ reflections on androgyny which he elaborated during his course on Neutre at the Collège de France. For Barthes, Neutre is a vector of symbolic change: « un mélange, un dosage, une dialectique, non de l’homme et de la femme (génitalité), mais du masculin et du féminin. Ou mieux encore: l’homme en qui il y a du féminin, la femme en qui il y a du masculin ». Neutre is whatever breaks the binary opposition between terms A and B by assuming the form of either “not A nor B”, or “A+B”. Neutre is therefore an attempt to elude the doxa and all immutable binary scheme of meaning through linguistic and rhetoric strategies such as epicene nouns and names, impersonals, a fluctuant use of gender forms, amphibology, irony, paradox, parallelism, antiphrasis.