Surrealism's Queer Methods

Is there a queer surrealism? The 2022 Venice Biennale’s “Milk of Dreams” made a convincing case for the feminist and ecological lessons to be learned from the work of women surrealists. This panel similarly picks up on the political potentials of mining surrealist praxis in the context of queer theory and trans epistemologies today. The recent Art Journal publication “A Syllabus on Transgender and Nonbinary Methods for Art and Art History” by Che Gossett and David Getsy offers a potential roadmap for revisiting surrealism’s toolkit of visual strategies, particularly around key terms they highlight including language, flesh, bodies, representations, visibilities, opacities, materialities, forms, and collectivities.

Papers might address the work of queer surrealist affiliates like Claude Cahun and Jean Cocteau or explore more speculative resonances and possibilities. Can we trace a genealogy from the deconstructive potentials of Georges Bataille’s “informe” to Eliza Steinbock’s Shimmering Images? Is the “exquisite corpse” trans*? Are Eileen Agar’s more-than-human constructions “queer ecologies”? What political potentials exist within René Magritte’s de-coupling of word and image? And, importantly for combating today’s rising anti-trans fascism, what lessons might we learn from the collaborative art/activism of Cahun and Marcel Moore in Nazi-occupied Jersey? By critically revisiting surrealist ideas and practices, this panel seeks to find untapped queer potentials latent in this historical movement and to propose these re-politicized techniques for queer activism and production today.

Inspired by the 2021–22 exhibition “Surrealism Beyond Borders,” this panel hopes to present topics across a geographically-expansive map of surrealism's aesthetic and political influences.