The species of surrealism

The Species of Surrealism explores surrealist artists and writers whose work offers progressive models of human and nonhuman species equality. From 1920 to 1950, the surrealists sought to harness dreams, the unconscious, and the illogical and, as a result, they labeled marginal figures—particularly animals and women—as mere objects of desire. Yet, by the 1930s, the women surrealists collectively embraced these “natural” identities and “female-earth” stereotypes to assert an active rather than passive role in twentieth-century culture. In their marvelous tales and fantastic images, these feminist makers incorporated all the elements of life, often imagining themselves in relation to animals, plants, and microscopic specimen. By embracing the self as other and the animal as self, they revised traditional creation stories to link women with her fellow, othered species. Their creations illustrate that the female figure was not only created with the earth—she was a creator herself.

This dissertation surveys the multi-media forms of surrealist art and writing, including short stories, poetry, drawings, paintings, and design patents. Through these media forms, women surrealists imagined radical hybrid creatures and adaptive female forms, their diverse spectrum of species ranging from mammal to micro-matter, lichen to organic celluloids (i.e. plant-based plastics). I argue that pioneering thinkers like Leonora Carrington, Remedios Varo, Gisèle Prassinos, and Mina Loy developed a feminist ethics in line with ecological thinking, which anticipated the gender and species-based concerns of the twenty-first century. This research offers a more inclusive approach to the surrealist movement in its consideration of underexplored ecological themes that exhibits our evolving understanding of species co-existence over the past century.