“Talk About Complications!”: Surrealism’s Trouble with Women

Abstract: This article approaches the ‘problem’ of woman in Surrealism indirectly by way of a consideration of same-sex desire and sexual difference. For all its celebration of ‘woman’, the surrealist movement initially struggled to accommodate the experience of the feminine, which functioned primarily as a figure of difference. Indeed, the heightened affirmation of sexual difference served a dual function: it not only helped negotiate the threat of same-sex desire within the homosocial context of the surrealist group, but it also reinforced the insistent imagining of the female body as a series of fetishistic part-objects. This would have important implications on the status of women artists and writers, serving to marginalize female agency and experience. The implications of this hypothesis are explored through an analysis of the treatment of desire in the work of Max Ernst and Claude Cahun.