Toyen captured by identitarian politics?

review

English

On March 10, 2019, the blogger Petr Tomek published a radical text Přestaňeme lhát o Toyen [Let’s stop lying about Toyen], where, based on the testimony of Jaroslav Siefert, he argued that at the time Seifert met Toyen, they talked about themselves in the masculine gender and, therefore, that we must take Toyen as a transgender man into account. The linguist Jana Valdrová provided the same argument a year and a half later in her blog post Toyen byl muž. Učme se to respektovat [Toyen was a man. Let’s learn to respect that]. This interpretation of Toyen’s gender identity subsequently began to be promoted by the organisation Transparent, which fights for the rights of transgender people in the Czech Republic. The ambivalence of Toyen’s gender identity was stirred up again around the exhibition project Toyen: The Dreaming Rebel, which was staged at the National Gallery in Prague between April 9 and August 22, 2021. The curator of the exhibition, Anna Pravdová, commented on this in an interview for Harper’s Bazaar: ‘the fact that she spoke of herself in the masculine gender, says Jaroslav Seifert, [...] that is the only source. […] No one in France confirmed this to me. […] Maybe she just had periods like that and then she stopped.’ Both reviewers of the exhibition, Eva Skopalová for the national art magazine Art+Antiques and Martin Vaněk for the main Czech art web journal Artalk.cz, decided to write about Toyen explicitly in the masculine gender, because they felt that the exhibition did not address these issues sufficiently.

Toyen; surrealism; erotic; psychoanalysis; Czech avant-garde; queer; transgender

JACKSON, L.

1. 9. 2023

Masarykova univerzita v Brně

Brno

10

https://digilib.phil.muni.cz/sites/default/files/pdf/AEC2023-3-09_v2.pdf