Quiet Resistance: Claude Cahun’s Queer Aesthetic Against Fascist Visual Coherence
Amid the rise of authoritarian regimes in interwar Europe, visual culture was a powerful vehicle for shaping national identity, idealized citizenship, and gendered subjecthood. Fascist aesthetics privileged clarity, order, and heroic embodiment—visual strategies that aligned with political ambitions to construct a coherent national identity rooted in masculine strength and mythic unity. Within this context, the photographic self-portraits of Claude Cahun (1894–1954) offer a counter-aesthetic that is neither overtly militant nor conventionally oppositional, yet profoundly subversive in form. Their work mobilizes ambiguity, stillness, and theatrical self- staging to unsettle fixed notions of identity and power, suggesting that opacity and refusal can function as tactics of resistance within the visual field.
Cahun’s practice engaged with surrealist strategies of estrangement while anticipating later queer and feminist aesthetics. Drawing from theatrical costuming, literary play, and photographic manipulation, their images perform a disidentification with gender, ideology, and selfhood. Rather than offering a coherent subject to be consumed or categorized, Cahun’s self- portraits presents a mode of representation that evaded dominant visual codes, especially those mobilized by interwar fascist regimes to construct and naturalize ideals of masculine strength, national unity, and aesthetic order. Examined via theories of gender and performativity, Cahun’s work can be understood as a critique not only of normative gender but of the visual frameworks that worked to uphold regimes of power during the interwar period in Europe.
The 1927 self-portrait I Am in Training, Don’t Kiss Me exemplifies this aesthetic of ambiguity. In the photograph, Cahun stages a gender-ambiguous persona through costume, text, and pose, constructing an image that is both performative and opaque. The layers of stylization, inscription, and direct address resists easy legibility, deliberately unsettling the viewer’s expectations of gender coherence. When placed against the backdrop of fascist visual culture, exemplified by works such as Richard Spitz’s Ins Dritte Reich (1933), Cahun’s refusal of clarity becomes all the more politically resonant.
This paper contends that Claude Cahun’s I Am in Training, Don’t Kiss Me performs a quiet yet radical disruption of heteromasculinist fascist visual order through its embrace of ambiguity, performance, and opacity, offering a counter-model of subjectivity grounded in theatrical self-staging and disidentification. In contrast to the eschatological and hypermasculine spectacle of fascist image-making—exemplified by Richard Spitz’s Ins Dritte Reich (1933)— Cahun’s self-portrait offers a queer subjectivity that refuses to be fixed within the visual grammar of authoritarian ideology. Through a performative engagement with the photographic medium, Cahun enacts a form of micro-resistance that undermines totalitarian visual codes not through overt confrontation, but via deferral and the refusal of clarity. Grounded in visual analysis and informed by theories of performativity, queer aesthetics, and fascist cultural mythologies, this essay argues that Cahun’s self-portrait performs a minor yet potent form of aesthetic resistance that disorients rather than propagandizes. A brief comparative analysis with Spitz’s work will underscore this contrast between visual coherence and disruption.
Ambiguity as Aesthetic Resistance
In I Am in Training, Don’t Kiss Me, Cahun mobilizes the photographic portrait as a site of ambiguity and refusal, assembling visual cues that deliberately disrupt stable readings of gender, authority, and identity. The image presents Cahun seated in a darkened, stage-like setting, wearing a tight leotard adorned with two dark, circular patches where nipples might be imagined, and a knotted scarf around the neck. Their expression is flat and unreadable, and their makeup is theatrical—rouged cheeks, drawn lashes, a beauty mark, and painted lips—intensifying the image’s ambivalence. Across their chest, in bold hand-painted letters, the phrase “I am in training, don’t kiss me” appears, followed by a scrawled pair of lips. Cahun’s hands rest lightly on a painted barbell that bears further illustrations and names, merging play with symbolic weight.
Rather than coalescing into a coherent figure, these elements produce a persona that is both constructed and deliberately opaque. The leotard and barbell gesture toward physical strength and discipline, while the painted makeup and flirtatious inscription evoke coded femininity and theatrical artifice. Yet none of these signs resolve into a fixed gendered identity; instead, they suspend the viewer in interpretive uncertainty. This refusal of legibility is central to the image’s politics. The subject is neither convincingly masculine nor wholly feminine, neither assertively defiant nor passively available. Cahun offers not a mask for the camera, but a layered performance that eludes capture.
This ambiguity aligns with Judith Butler’s theorization of gender as performative— produced through stylized repetition rather than expressive of a core identity.1 Cahun’s image does not seek to represent gender but to expose its contingency, its theatrical construction, and its refusal to resolve into a legible binary. American art historian Amelia Jones’s concept of the self- portrait as a “technology of embodiment”2 further deepens this reading, positioning photography not as a mirror of selfhood but as a medium that actively stages and reconfigures subjectivity through performative acts. In her reading of Cahun, Jones emphasizes how the photographic self- portrait both affirms and displaces the subject, arguing that “by performing the self through photographic means, artists like Cahun play out the instabilities of human existence and identity in a highly technologized and rapidly changing environment.”3 The photographic self-portrait “foreground[s] the ‘I’ as other to itself,” enacting subjectivity as a process rather than a fixed state.4 This theoretical framework is particularly resonant when considering the visual structure of I Am in Training, Don’t Kiss Me. The image is a layered performance that defers meaning even as it asserts presence. Cahun’s use of makeup, costume, and props—as well as the inscription across the chest—renders the body both visually available and symbolically inaccessible. It is not just that the subject cannot be neatly categorized, but that the photograph actively resists the terms through which legibility is imposed. In this sense, the image performs a visual disidentification, challenging the demand for coherence embedded in both fascist visual culture and traditional portraiture. The photograph becomes a site where selfhood is enacted, deferred, and reinterpreted—resisting capture through visual codes that seek to stabilize meaning. In this way, Cahun enacts a mode of visual resistance through gender indeterminacy, destabilizing the fascist aesthetic logic that prized order, clarity, and idealized masculinity. The image performs its politics not by stating them, but by frustrating the very visual frameworks through which authoritarian ideologies secure meaning.
Theatricality, Artifice, and Surrealist Estrangement
Claude Cahun’s I Am in Training, Don’t Kiss Me moves beyond functioning as a photographic document of identity, becoming a staged performance, consciously constructed through layers of theatrical signs—makeup, costume, inscription, and pose. In analyzing Cahun’s photographic practice, scholar Miranda Welby-Everard characterizes it as a “private stage” in which theatrical self-fashioning functions as an aesthetic of refusal.5 Rather than expressing a stable self, Cahun deliberately enacts ambiguity through layers of visual artifice. The portrait’s exaggerated femininity, ambiguous physical markers, and ironic inscription offer not a coherent persona but a tension between surface and legibility. The theatrical mise-en-scène becomes a space where the self is not revealed but performed, destabilizing the premise of portraiture as a site of self-revelation. The result is a portrait that invites interpretation while denying resolution.
This embrace of artifice and theatricality aligns Cahun’s work—if obliquely—with surrealist practices of visual estrangement, particularly in their shared resistance to realism, naturalism, and coherence. While Cahun was never officially affiliated with André Breton’s surrealist circle, their work nevertheless mobilizes surrealist strategies of estrangement and disidentification to expose an instability of meaning; the photograph’s exaggerated femininity, ironic inscription, and ambiguous persona invoke the surrealist impulse to defamiliarize the banal and reveal its constructedness. In I am in training, the clash between visual codes of masculinity and femininity, the symbolic use of text, and the stylized setting produce an effect akin to the surrealist uncanny. The image resists narrative resolution, instead inviting the viewer into an interpretive process that remains deliberately suspended.
For queer studies scholar Jill Richards, Claude Cahun’s engagement with surrealist aesthetics reflects a broader effort among queer artists to navigate the constraints of legibility imposed by interwar political and social systems. Rather than celebrating fluid identity as a liberatory condition, Richards argues that Cahun’s self-portraiture grapples with the complex demands of appearing at all under structures of state surveillance, juridical control, and cultural exclusion. Surrealist strategies such as estrangement, irony, and fragmentation serve not as gestures of escapism, but as tactics of negotiation within what Richards calls “a domain of constraint”6—the historically specific and often hostile terrain in which queer embodiment must be performed. Through this lens, Cahun’s images do not enact a redemptive narrative of queer identity, but instead foreground the instability, precarity, and opacity of selfhood under authoritarian conditions. The self, as staged in these photographs, is neither triumphant nor transparent; it emerges obliquely, resisting incorporation into nationalist mythologies not through outright negation, but through aesthetic strategies of refusal, deferral, and non-normative appearance.
These ideas also align with modern-Europe scholar Carolyn Dean’s reading of Cahun’s work as a meditation on mortality and self-erasure. Dean describes Cahun’s photographic self as a “mort imaginaire”—an imagined death that operates within the image, dislocating the subject from visual stability and narrative continuity.7 In I am in training, this imagined death does not manifest through absence, but through theatricality, ironic self-styling and a refusal of coherence. The self is not fully present but provisional and in a form of drag. Like Richards, Dean emphasizes that Cahun’s selfhood does not assert visibility as liberation but instead dramatizes the instability of being seen at all. The image thus becomes a site where identity is both constructed and undone, ultimately resistant to capture and impossible to resolve within the visual demands of the state.
Cahun’s visual choices thus resisted fascist demands for clarity, unity, and legibility. In a visual culture that sought to mythologize the body of the citizen-soldier through heroic embodiment and symbolic coherence, Cahun turned instead to costume, irony, and estrangement— constructing a queer counter-aesthetic that works to unravel rather than consolidate identity. This politics of opacity and refusal becomes all the more striking when placed in contrast to the monumental visual logic of fascist image-making, where clarity itself becomes a tool of ideological enforcement.
Visual Coherence and Mythic Masculinity
Fascist regimes understood the power of visual culture as a tool to consolidate ideology, mobilize mass sentiment, and forge a unified national identity. Within this framework, art did not merely reflect political values—it actively constructed them, operating as a myth-making mechanism and aestheticizing domination through visual spectacles of discipline, submission, and mass conformity.8 Richard Spitz’s painting Ins Dritte Reich (1933) is emblematic of this process, presenting a monumental eschatological vision of Nazi greatness that conflated aesthetic form with authoritarian function.9 The image, which depicts a massive crowd of uniformed men moving toward a radiant temple-like structure crowned by a glowing swastika, stages fascism as a collective rite of passage and as a vision of teleological inevitability—an endpoint toward which history must inexorably move. The sky is thick with spectral soldiers ascending toward the heavens, forming a dual visual allegory of martyrdom and transcendence. The fallen soldier becomes an ideological foundation of the future—sacrificed to the mythic promise of rebirth.
Spitz’s painting is a site of aestheticized ideology. As Susan Sontag argues, fascist aesthetics are characterized by a preoccupation with control, unity, and submission, often rendered through pageantry, symmetry, and depersonalized repetition.10 The massed bodies in Spitz’s painting are no longer individuals; they have become symbolic matter, bound together by discipline and directed toward a singular goal. The composition’s vanishing point—the temple beneath the swastika—enacts a visual teleology that mirrors fascist eschatology: history has a single, inevitable endpoint, and it culminates in the apotheosis of the nation.11
Spitz’s painting presents the male body as an idealized, virile emblem of national strength and moral clarity: the muscular, uniformed bodies, part of a militarized spectacle, ultimately function as symbols of purity and ideological submission. The ecstatic upward gaze, mirrored across dozens of figures, implies a kind of transcendental obedience. In this vision, the body is not autonomous; it exists to be subsumed into the will of the Volk. Against this epic and mythic visual coherence, Cahun’s I Am in Training asserts a radically different politics of form. Where Spitz’s painting is large-scale and monumental, Cahun’s photograph is intimate and self- contained. While Spitz stages submission to a higher ideological calling, Cahun enacts a performance of ambiguity and self-determination—visualized through a subversion of gender norms via the use of makeup, costume, and a direct gaze that asserts a unique and singular subjectivity. Their image is not a mythic projection of collective destiny but a theatrical staging of queer individuality.
The contrast between the two works is visual and also ontological. Spitz’s fascist imaginary relies on the dissolution of the self into a masculine nationalist project. As Olaf Peters argues, fascist regimes viewed modernist and surrealist works as “degenerate,” precisely because their formal experimentation threatened the ideological clarity required by fascist myth- making.12 Surrealist ambiguity, like that in Cahun’s work, thus would have introduced friction into the fascist visual grammar of coherence. In this light, Cahun’s performative refusal of gendered and ideological legibility becomes aesthetic and political.
Additionally, Cahun’s image stands in opposition to the eschatological logic of Ins Dritte Reich. Spitz’s painting stages fascism as an inevitable redemption through sacrifice; Cahun, by contrast, fragments meaning and refuses narrative finality. Their photograph suspends meaning rather than propels it forward. In this way, the image enacts what might be called a queer counter-eschatology: no glorious end, no mythic future, only the complexity of a subject present, performing in front of the camera.
The juxtaposition of Cahun’s ambiguous self-performance with Spitz’s monumental fascist vision reveals how aesthetic form becomes a site of ideological struggle. The fascist valourization of a certain kind of beauty—hypermasculine and orderly—is exposed as a visual regime that seeks legibility, purity, and mythic unity. Cahun’s image, in contrast, fragments the gaze, withholds resolution, and resists incorporation. It performs a minor but potent refusal: the refusal to be seen clearly in a political context that demands visibility as a form of submission.
In conclusion, Claude Cahun’s I Am in Training, Don’t Kiss Me operates within the charged visual field of interwar Europe, where clarity, unity, and virile symbolism served the ideological ambitions of fascist aesthetics. Against this backdrop, Cahun’s image stages a different relationship to the body, to power, and to representation itself. The photograph foregrounds theatrical ambiguity, visual estrangement, and a refusal of narrative closure. In doing so, it disrupts the fascist impulse to codify meaning, to fix identity within a singular, legible frame. What emerges instead is a portrait of resistance shaped by presence without legibility, embodiment without surrender. Cahun’s strategies—layered costuming, ironic inscription, and a gaze that neither yields nor confronts—refuse to resolve the subject into any stable ideological or gendered category. The photograph challenges the very mechanisms through which images were used to consolidate collective belief, offering a counter-aesthetic grounded in uncertainty and disidentification. Juxtaposed with works like Richard Spitz’s Ins Dritte Reich, Cahun’s self-portrait demonstrates how visual form can carry ideological weight. The photograph doesn’t aspire to transcendence or unity, but dwells in complexity, opacity, and play. It presents an image of subjectivity that interrupts the smooth surfaces of fascist mythology. In the quiet friction between performance and refusal, Cahun offers an enduring critique of visual systems built on coherence, purity, and control—proposing instead an aesthetic that privileges ambiguity, interiority, and self-stylization over ideological clarity.
Notes
1 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London: Routledge, 2002), 179.
2 Amelia Jones, “The ‘Eternal Return’: Self-Portrait Photography as a Technology of Embodiment,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society vol. 27, no. 4 (2002): 950.
3 Ibid.
4 Ibid.
5 Miranda Welby-Everard, “Imaging the Actor: The Theatre of Claude Cahun,” Oxford Art Journal 29, no. 1 (2006): 7.
6 Jill Richards, The Fury Archives: Female Citizenship, Human Rights, and the International Avant-Gardes (New York: Columbia University Press, 2020), 190.
7 Carolyn J. Dean, “Claude Cahun’s Double,” Yale French Studies 90 (1996): 71.
8 Susan Sontag, “Fascinating Fascism,” in Under the Sign of Saturn (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1980), 91.
9 Dr. Vanessa Parent, “The Aestheticization of Politics: The Rise of Fascism, Nazism and the Myth of National Regeneration,” lecture, ARTH 367, Concordia University, February 10, 2025.
10 Sontag, “Fascinating Fascism,” 94.
11 Parent, ARTH 367 Lecture on the Aestheticization of Politics, February 10, 2025.
12 Olaf Peters, “From Nordau to Hitler: ‘Degeneration’ and Anti-Modernism Between the Fin-de-Siècle and the National Socialist Takeover of Power,” in Degenerate Art: The Attack on Modern Art in Nazi Germany, 1937, ed. Olaf Peters (Munich: Prestel, 2014).