University of California Press Surrealist Masculinities: Gender Anxiety and the Aesthetics of Post-World War I Reconstruction in France

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.