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This edited volume excavates overlooked connections between surrealist creative strategies, queer theory, and trans epistemologies, from the 1920s to the present. It will be the first book to focus on 'queer surrealism'—first identifying untapped queer potentials latent in the historical movement and then tracing surrealism’s revolutionary influence on art made in the context of postwar social movements.
Each essay explores a single creative technique and explores how that surrealist strategy helped artists negotiate queer/trans identity or agitate for queer causes. With essays on Mexican printmaking, Haitian religious practices, and collages made by American AIDS activists—among other geographies and contexts—leading queer theorists and surrealist scholars explore the long, global history of surrealism’s queer possibilities. A gathering of art historians, artists, and queer theorists, this volume speaks to surrealist specialists but also any scholars or artists interested in gender, sexuality, and visual culture in the 20th and 21st centuries.
Surrealism’s queer methods: a historiography and manifesto – Alex Zivkovic
Part I Excavating queerness in interwar surrealism
1 A quiver of small slivers: Jacques Vaché and the queer facts and figures of the avant-garde – Jennifer J. Wild
2 Male lesbian surrealism – Rachel Silveri
3 Disorienting seduction: transgender possibility in Hans Bellmer’s The Machine-Gunneress in a State of Grace (1937) – Claude Mohr
4 “Astound me!”: Cocteau’s queer, autopoetic, and reparative surrealist cinema – Christophe Wall-Romana
5 Queer indirection and the politics of pareidolia in Claude Cahun’s surrealistic methods – Amelia Groom
Part II Reflecting on the exquisite corpse
6 Queering the exquisite corpse: the edgeplay of Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore – Erin E. Edwards
7 Frida Kahlo’s selective surrealism: self-portraiture as agitation in postrevolutionary Mexico – Maggie Borowitz
8 Is that a puppy in your pants or are you just happy to be? Surrealist sexing in Chaplin’s A Dog’s Life – Jed Samer
9 Chains of love: a vision of queer art history as exquisite corpse – David J. Getsy
Part III Tracing surrealism in the postwar period
10 Modern/Camp: Tchelitchew at the Gallery of Modern Art – Sandra Zalman
11 The Moldy and the outmoded: Jack Smith’s surrealism – Jack Owen Crawford
12 The epic intimacies of Rose-Marie Desruisseau and Célestin Faustin – Julián Sánchez González
13 “Which Side Are You On?”: Ronnie Burk, queer Chicano surrealist and dissident ACT UP activist – Abigail Susik