French artist Claude Cahun defied authority and the status quo both personally and politically. She was a founding member of the Surrealist group Contre-Attaque, which opposed Hitler and fascism. While living on the Nazi-occupied Channel Islands during World War II, she and her lover Marcel Moore, who was also her stepsister, created and distributed anti-Nazi flyers, for which they were sentenced to death (though the penalty was never carried out). Joining Surrealism early, in the 1920s, Cahun also challenged misogyny, homophobia, and antisemitism within the group itself, as a gender-nonconforming, Jewish artist. Insisting on the gender category of “neuter” for herself, she created performative, proto-feminist photographs—many of them self-portraits—that play with identity, combine traditionally masculine and feminine attributes, and deconstruct the concept of the self.