In the surrealist revolt against the state, the Church, and the family, the mother figure became a key target, both as custodian of bourgeois-patriarchal values and as symbol of Catholic doctrine. In works such as Georges Bataille’s Story of the Eye (1928), Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel’s L’age d’or (1930), and Joyce Mansour’s Jules César (1955), mothers are attacked and violated, suffering a fate similar to those of the detested mother figures in the fiction of the Marquis de Sade. Yet not all mothers in surrealist art and literature are portrayed in such unequivocally negative terms. Focusing on Leonor Fini’s Mourmour, conte pour enfants velus (1976) and Dorothea Tanning’s Chasm: A Weekend (2004), this chapter traces an alternative history of surrealist representations of the mother, one in which this figure is rendered more ambiguous and at times even invested with revolutionary potential. These novels, the chapter suggests, elaborate representations of maternity in critical dialogue with Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis. As such they resonate to some extent with the (largely contemporaneous) work of French feminist theorists such as Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, and Hélène Cixous, in which the concept of maternity becomes configured as an alternative to the phallocentric symbolic order.

This chapter seeks to map the key feminist critiques of and debates around Surrealism in the 1970s and 1980s, after which point feminist Surrealist scholarship underwent a marked proliferation and, building on these earlier insights, developed in fresh and innovative directions. Focusing primarily on francophone and anglophone scholarship, this chapter aims to establish how these bodies of work both diverge from and overlap with each other, as well as to account for the ways in which they intersect with and contribute to broader contemporaneous cultural and theoretical debates.

This essay explores the concern in Dorothea Tannings work of the late 1960s and early 1970s with touch, contiguity, and the concept of maternity. In addition to a series of paintings and drawings that connote intimacy and whose titles allude to maternity, during this period Tanning also gave form to a group of soft sculptures, which similarly evince a preoccupation with closeness and touch, and indicate a form of intimacy that challenges the limits of the individual subject. Tannings engagement with these themes, the essay argues, resonates closely with the feminist poetics developed around the same time by poststructuralist theorists such as Helene Cixous, Julia Kristeva, and Luce Irigaray. I propose that Irigarays theories of maternity, subjectivity, and non-phallocentric language offer a particularly rich set of analytical tools with which to understand Tannings work. Through establishing the affinities between Tanning and Irigaray, I suggest, we can better understand the intellectual currents that flowed between poststructuralist feminism and surrealist womens work of this period.

Leonora Carrington’s surrealist novel The Hearing Trumpet (written sometime in the 1950s but not published until 1974)¹ is at once a parodic quest narrative, a fictionalised transposition of Robert Graves’s 1948 study The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth (which Carrington described as ‘the 2 greatest revelation’ of her life²) and a utopian vision of an ethics of being and knowing. Narrated by its whimsical, anecdote-prone and near-deaf protagonist, the ninety-two-year-old Marian Leatherby, the novel chronicles six elderly women’s search for the Holy Grail in a nursing home for the aged. As Jonathan P. Eburne has observed,...

This chapter explores the genealogies between Surrealism’s quest to express or represent the unconscious unrestrained by rational thought, and the pursuit in 1970s avant-garde feminism of a new language – an “écriture féminine” – that would be uncontaminated by phallocentric logic. Through a reading of selected works by two figures situated at the intersection of these two aesthetic and theoretical movements – feminist theorist Xavière Gauthier and artist and writer Dorothea Tanning – the chapter demonstrates that these links are not unidirectional but a dynamic dialogue. This dialogue signals not only an allegiance to Surrealism at the heart of poststructuralist/psychoanalytic feminism but also a germinal feminist poetics in historical Surrealism – that would come to full fruition in 1970s Surrealist activity.

This chapter reviews a selection of books published in 2019 relevant to feminist critical and cultural theory. The chapter is divided into four sections: 1. Introduction; 2. Feminist Handbooks, which reviews The Routledge Handbook of Contemporary Feminism, edited by Tasha Oren and Andrea L. Press, and The Bloomsbury Handbook of 21st-Century Feminist Theory, edited by Robin Truth Goodman; 3. Revolutionary Feminism, which reviews Cinzia Arruzza, Tithi Bhattacharya, and Nancy Fraser’s Feminism for the 99 Percent: A Manifesto; 4. Feminism and Pornography, which reviews Last Days at Hot Slit: The Radical Feminism of Andrea Dworkin, edited by Johanna Fateman and Amy Scholder, and Andrew Altman and Lori Watson’s co-authored Debating Pornography.

This chapter reviews a selection of books published in 2018 relevant to feminist critical and cultural theory. The chapter is divided into three sections: 1. Introduction; 2. Feminist Pasts, which reviews Victoria Margree’s Neglected or Misunderstood: The Radical Feminism of Shulamith Firestone, Celia Marshik and Allison Pease’s Modernism, Sex, and Gender, and Ania Loomba’s Revolutionary Desires: Women, Communism, and Feminism in India; 3. Feminist Presents, which reviews Orienting Feminism: Media, Activism and Cultural Representation, edited by Catherine Dale and Rosemary Overell, and Emma Young’s Contemporary Feminism and Women’s Short Stories.

This chapter reviews a selection of books published in 2017 relevant to feminist critical and cultural theory. Although the studies reviewed are different in their focus, methods, and aims, they share a concern with the (feminist) ethics of the everyday. The chapter is divided into five sections: 1. Introduction; 2. Feminist Lives, which reviews Sara Ahmed’s Living a Feminist Life and bell hooks and Stuart Hall’s Uncut Funk: A Contemplative Dialogue; 3. Feminist Philosophy, which reviews Luce Irigaray’s To Be Born: Genesis of a New Human Being, Astrida Neimanis’s Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology, and Lori Jo Marso’s Politics with Beauvoir: Freedom in the Encounter; 4. Feminisms across the Globe, which reviews Decolonizing Feminism: Transnational Feminism and Globalization, edited by Margaret A. McLaren; 5. Conclusion.

In 1972, Angela Carter translated Xavière Gauthier’s ground-breaking feminist critique of the surrealist movement, Surréalisme et sexualité (1971). Although the translation was never published, the project at once confirmed and consolidated Carter’s previous interest in surrealism, representation, gender and desire and aided her formulation of a new surrealist-feminist aesthetic. Carter’s sustained engagement with surrealist aesthetics and politics as well as surrealist scholarship aptly demonstrates what is at stake for feminism at the intersection of avant-garde aesthetics and the representation of women and female desire. Drawing on previously unexplored archival material, such as typescripts, journals, and letters, Anna Watz’s study is the first to trace the full extent to which Carter’s writing was influenced by the surrealist movement and its critical heritage. Watz’s book is an important contribution to scholarship on Angela Carter as well as to contemporary feminist debates on surrealism, and will appeal to scholars across the fields of contemporary British fiction, feminism, and literary and visual surrealism.

This article interrogates what has been referred to as the "Fifty Shades phenomenon" in contemporary popular culture and media - a cultural trend that represents female desire and pleasure in terms of submission and masochism. The article reflects on how contemporary feminist literary criticism and theory might approach this phenomenon. The texts in question claim to liberate and empower women sexually, when in reality they perpetuate a deeply conservative and hetero-normative view of sexuality, desire and pleasure. More specifically, the article discusses how a feminist analysis of the pleasure generated in many women by these depictions of female submission and masochism can avoid being locked into a reductive dichotomy between "sex-positive" and "sex-negative" feminism, which characterised many feminist debates in the 1970s and 1980s. This article discusses ways in which the feminist literary critic can approach a cultural phenomenon that is not confined within a popular literary sphere, but that also dominates much contemporary popular media and trade. The scale of the media context in which female desire has been recently popularised, shaped and circulated poses new questions to - and demands new approaches of - feminist analyses, which this paper seeks to address.