On Being a Sketch: Trans/Queer Juvenilia and the Aesthetics of De-Formation
A Talk by Hannah Freed-Thall
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This talk offers a reflection on two experimental trans/queer collaborations: Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore’s early illustrated volume, Vues et Visions (1919), and Tomas Cali’s short film, L’Esquisse (The Sketch, 2023). At stake in these works is an act of shared coming out—an exposure that is at once a taking shape and a coming undone.
Hannah Freed-Thall is Associate Professor of French Literature, Thought, and Culture at NYU. Her first book, Spoiled Distinctions: Aesthetics and the Ordinary in French Modernism (OUP, 2015) was awarded the Scaglione Prize for French & Francophone Studies and the Modernist Studies Association Prize for a First Book. Her second book, Modernism at the Beach: Queer Ecologies and the Coastal Commons, appeared last year in Columbia University Press's "Modernist Latitudes" series.
This talk is presented in partnership by the Columbia Maison Française, The Department of French, and the Institute for the Study of Sexuality and Gender. Co-sponsored by the Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities.
