Surrealist Masculinities

Surrealist Masculinities offers a fresh exploration of how surrealist visual production was shaped by constructions of gender and sexuality, particularly masculinity, in the 1920s and early 1930s. Amy Lyford builds on feminist critical approaches to surrealism, which have viewed the female body in surrealism as symptomatic of male misogyny; yet she also departs from such work by arguing that representations of an anxious, ambivalent, or perverse masculinity were integral to the movement's critique of France's "return to order" in the years following World War I. This book analyzes surrealist work in relation to the history of surrealism and investigates how surrealist artists and writers appropriated contemporary medical science, advertising, and sexology in their quest to undermine the status quo.

Amy Lyford is Associate Professor of Art History at Occidental College.

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments

Introduction: The Paradox of Surrealist Masculinity
1. Anxiety and Perversion in Postwar Paris
2. The Aesthetics of Dismemberment
3. The Advertisement of Emasculation: André Kertész in Surrealist Paris
4. Man Ray, Lee Miller, and the Photography of Surrealist Sexuality
5. The Lessons of Barbette: Surrealism, Fascism, and the Politics of Sexual Metamorphosis
Conclusion: A Postscript on Masculinity and Reconstruction

Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index