Surrealism and women - Mary Ann Caws

These sixteen illustrated essays present an important revision of surrealism by focusing on the works of women surrealists and their strategies to assert positions as creative subjects within a movement that regarded woman primarily as an object of masculine desire or fear.While the male surrealists attacked aspects of the bourgeois order, they reinforced the traditional patriarchal image of woman. Their emphasis on dreams, automatic writing, and the unconscious reveal some of the least inhibited masculine fantasies. The first resistance to the male surrealists' projection of the female figure arose in the writings and paintings of marginalized woman artists and writers associated with Surrealism. The essays in this collection explore the complexity of these women's works, which simultaneously employ and subvert the dominant discourse of male surrealists.

Essays
What Do Little Girls Dream Of: The Insurgent Writing of Gisle Prassinos
Finding What You Are Not Looking For
From Djeuner en fourrure to Caroline: Meret Oppenheim's Chronicle of Surrealism
Speaking with Forked Tongues: "Male" Discourse in "Female" Surrealism?
Androgyny: Interview with Meret Oppenheim
The Body Subversive: Corporeal Imagery in Carrington, Prassinos, and Mansour
Identity Crises: Joyce Mansour's Narratives
Joyce Mansour and Egyptian Mythology
In the Interim: The Constructivist Surrealism of Kay Sage
The Flight from Passion in Leonora Carrington's Literary Work
Beauty and/Is the Beast: Animal Symbology in the Work of Leonora Carrington, Remedio Varo, and Leonor Fini
Valentine, Andr, Paul et les autres, or the Surrealization of Valentine Hugo
Refashioning the World to the Image of Female Desire: The Collages of Aube Ellout
Eileen Agar
Statement by Dorothea Tanning