Equivocal Masculinity: New York Dada in the context of World War I Amelia Jones This essay is dedicated to my great uncle Richard Jeffery and my great aunt Gretchen Jeffery, both in active service in the U.S. Army in northern France during World War I (the latter in the nursing corps), and to my children's great-great uncle, Anthony Harvey Bowman, Second Lieutenant, Royal Field Artillery in the British Army, killed at the Somme, 20 May 1916. 1 The individual who is not himself a combatant ± and so a wheel in the gigantic machinery of war ± feels conscious of disorientation, and of an inhibition in his powers and activities. (Sigmund Freud, `Thoughts on War and Death', 1915) 2 During World War I, the American artist Louis Bouche reports having seen a vision on the New York subway: a rangy German Baroness riding along with a French poilu's trench helmet ± perhaps the ultimate mixed metaphor of the Great War. 3 A German woman in a violently anti-German cultural context wearing a French soldier's helmet ± the Baroness von Freytag-Loringhoven (plate 11), in her elaborate self-performances through the streets and salons of New York City, thus embodied some of the most poignant cultural tensions of the WWI period. (She was even, at one point during the war, arrested as a spy and jailed for almost a month in New Haven, Connecticut.) 4 As Irene Gammel, her biographer, has put it, she `transport[ed] into New York the signs of traumatic confrontation that [were to] . . . terrorize a young generation of artists.' 5 The Baroness is a figure whose boundary-breaking performances rearticulated gendered and national identity to an extent far beyond that to which most of the male avant-gardists, their anti-bourgeois proclamations aside, were ever willing to go. A figure deemed by her cohorts to be `the first American dada.... [and the] only one living anywhere who dresses dada, loves dada, lives dada', 6 the Baroness, poet, model, artist and frequenter of the avant-garde salons, enacted the violent dislocations in personal and national identity put in play in the WWI period. As Daniel Sherman has argued, at this time, `gender served as a primary figure . . . for the social disruptions of war', a war for which `human loss had become the paramount sign.' 7 The Baroness performed an ostensible femininity itself dangerously tempered by masculine artistic agency and by the terrifyingly effusive Art History ISSN 0141-6790 Vol. 25 No. 2 April 2002 pp. 162±205 162 ß Association of Art Historians 2002. Published by Blackwell Publishers, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.