Dada and Gender: Rrose Selavy

[Butterfly]

Dada and Gender: Rrose Selavy
The Bilerico Project
Filed by: Gloria Brame Ph.D.
May 4, 2010 10:30 AM


http://www.bilerico.com/2010/05/dada_and_gender_rrose_selavy.php


Was Duchamp transgendered? Or was Rrose pure artifice? According to curators at MIT, who recently ran a gallery show on cross-dressing, Ray and Duchamp were purely focused on shock value and consciousness raising: "the transgressive act of dressing as a woman was a strategy intended to both shock the bourgeoisie as well as to inflate the sexually intense agendas of the Surrealists whose mostly male cohort felt some threat from an emerging feminism in 1920's Paris."