Training Don T Kiss Me Analysis

A feminist artist is one who uses art to question and critique the heterosexual and patriarchal master narrative of art and art history as well as on a social, cultural, and political scale. This is exactly what surrealist photographer and artist Claude Cahun does in her art. She challenges the ways in which gender and sexuality and performed and perceived, and showcase the viewpoint of the other, the androgynous and queer body. Although Cahun predates contemporary feminism and feminist theory, she perfectly exemplifies many different themes which are often highlighted, including authorship, representation, biological determinism, and gender performativity, the last of which will be highlighted in this essay. Although Cahun predates theorists

In the image, Cahun sits in a chair with her legs crossed with the large barbell in her lap. She is not taking on the role of an authentic weightlifter, but simply playing at being a weightlifter, with the weights that sit in her lap being an obvious prop to help indicate this. Cahun also does this with her gender, refusing to conform exclusively to a male or female performance, using certain characteristics as humorous props of her performance. The words written on her shirt mirror the title of the photograph “I AM IN TRAINING: DON’T KISS ME”, indicating that not only is she training as a weightlifter or a body builder, but also as Knafo suggests, that she is training in terms of gender performance . Although Cahun and her photographs existed many years before Butler and her theories of gender performativity, it is clear that Cahun was creating these photographs to express her own fluid gender identity and as a blatant act of defiance against a society which forbade gender non-conformity and homosexuality, serving as an excellent example of Butler’s