Subjectivity and Power：
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Historically situated subject
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Techniques of the self
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Self-governance and subject formation
Gender, Body, and Sexuality：
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Male gaze
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Female self-affirmation
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Embodied experience
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Orgasmic embodiment
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Misogyny structure (Ueno Chizuko’s concept)
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Suppressed female anger
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Nüshu (Women's writing)
Philosophical Frameworks：
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Affirmative ethics (Rosi Braidotti)
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Power-knowledge dynamics (Michel Foucault)
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Hybridity and non-binary identity
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Androgyny (Surrealist context)
Artistic and Literary Techniques：
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Surrealism (Dalí, Buñuel)
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Automatism and unconscious imagery
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Soma(tic) poetry rituals (CA Conrad)
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Hylozoic desires and ecological metaphor
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Neo-Expressionism
Psychoanalytic and Cultural Analysis：
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Male anxiety and emasculation fears
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Castration anxiety
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Masculinity and male bonding dynamics
Feminist Critique and Theory：
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Female body as a cultural inscription
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Patriarchal visual regimes
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Objectification versus subjectivity
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Cultural suppression of female sexuality and anger
Visual and Conceptual Metaphors：
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Body as landscape (Irigaray)
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Marking and embodiment (Tim Ingold)
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Cultural imprinting (Mark Dion’s "The Mark of the Fish"
Surrealist and Feminist Aesthetics: From Automatic Painting to Embodied Imagery
Surrealism, as an early 20th-century avant-garde movement, prized the irrational, the subconscious, and the revolutionary – values that on the surface seem liberating and anti-patriarchal. Surrealist artists practiced “automatic writing” and automatism, letting the unconscious mind spill out in words or drawings without rational control. This is directly relevant to my technique of automatic painting, which is essentially a descendant of that Surrealist strategy. By adopting automatic methods, I seek to bypass the internalized censor that might otherwise tone down my anger or conform my work to societal expectations. In a way, automatism lets suppressed emotions (like anger) surface in disguise, much as dreams do. This links back to Liang Yiyan’s and Zhao Liming’s observations: what cannot be said outright might be sung or drawn in a coded way. My fast, gestural strokes and abstract forms are my psyche’s “code,” akin to how Nüshu was a code for women’s discontent. Surrealists believed automatic creation could reveal truths censored by polite society; in my case, it reveals the truths of a woman’s experience that have been culturally censored (rage, lust, despair, etc.).
However, as feminist scholars have noted, historical Surrealism had its blind spots regarding gender. Many male Surrealists perpetuated misogynistic tropes even as they broke other taboos. For example, they often depicted woman as muse, mystic, or monstrosity rather than as equal creator. Art historian Whitney Chadwick and others have documented how women Surrealists were marginalized and how the movement’s images frequently objectified the female body (e.g., the faceless women in Man Ray’s photographs, or Salvador Dalí’s bizarrely dismembered female forms). Indeed, Ruth Hemus, examining Surrealism with a feminist lens, acknowledges the movement’s “revolutionary ambition” about sexuality but also unflinchingly critiques the “latent patriarchal bias” within it. Surrealist men often projected their anxieties (like emasculation anxiety) onto female figures in their art – for instance, Dalí’s limp watches and mutilated women can be read as expressing his fear of impotence or weakness, translated into controlling or fragmenting the female form. This dynamic reflects exactly Ueno’s point about misogyny: the male artist’s fear of weakness becomes a literal attack on the feminine (in art, by violating or distorting women’s bodies on canvas). The Surrealist “male fraternity,” led by figures like André Breton, also tended to relegate women to secondary roles; Breton himself, while decrying bourgeois patriarchy, acted as a gatekeeper of a new “spiritual patriarchy” within Surrealism. In sum, the Surrealist aesthetic opened up radical creative freedom, but its implementation was often skewed by the patriarchal gazes of its leading men.
Lastly, connecting back to the anger theme: surrealist and expressionist art techniques give me tools to express anger in a liberated form. Automatic painting can be a violent physical act (shades of Jackson Pollock’s flinging paint – though Pollock’s macho abstract expressionism also had its gender issues). I reclaim that physicality without the machismo: anger in my work might appear as slashes of red or chaotic texture, but it’s not about posturing – it’s about catharsis and testimony. I often think of the concept of the “Madwoman in the Attic” (the 19th-century literary trope of the raging, confined woman, analyzed by Gilbert and Gubar). In literature, women’s anger and madness were hidden in the attic (like Rochester’s wife Bertha in Jane Eyre), symbolizing how female rage is both produced by patriarchy and then used to brand the woman as crazy. In my art, I symbolically let the madwoman out of the attic – I give her the canvas to scream on. Surrealist fragmentation (like disjointed figures) can thus be repurposed: rather than fragmenting the female body to control it (as Bellmer did with dolls), I sometimes fragment it to represent the experience of psychological shattering or dissociation that external oppression causes. But then I try to reintegrate those fragments on my own terms, through an “affirmative” process of painting that accepts all emotions. Nietzsche’s philosophy of moving “from negation to affirmation” underpins this for me. I initially negated the roles and images imposed on me (negating traditional female aesthetics, negating the expectation to please). Now I seek to affirm a new vision – saying yes to the totality of my being, including the anger and the sensuality, and thereby crafting an aesthetic that is at once surreal (beyond the ordinary) and feminist (grounded in liberating the female self). Each automatic painting in my visual journal is thus an act of critical resistance and healing: it challenges the sociopolitical norms we’ve discussed – patriarchal silencing of anger, misogynistic contempt for the feminine, and the exclusionary male gaze – and it offers an alternative in the form of image and texture, a non-verbal yet eloquent declaration of female subjecthood.
As a contemporary female artist, I grapple with this Surrealist legacy. On one hand, I am inspired by Surrealism’s techniques – especially automatic painting and the exploration of dreams and libido – because they align with my goal of uncovering the subconscious. On the other hand, I consciously infuse these techniques with a feminist consciousness to avoid replicating the old biases. This involves a few strategies. First, I position myself (a woman) as the active subject of the automatic process, not the passive muse or fragmented object. When I engage in automatic painting, I am both the creator and often the subject of the emotions depicted. For instance, if I paint a climax state automatically, I’m effectively performing an écriture féminine in paint, letting my body’s sensation directly inform the imagery. This stands in contrast to, say, a male Surrealist painting a generic femme fatale or a symbolic woman to represent something in his mind. My automatic paintings are closer to what Leonora Carrington or Frida Kahlo did – using surreal imagery to map their own inner reality and anger against constraints – rather than what Max Ernst or Dalí did to the female form. In that sense, my work is a continuation of the women Surrealists (Carrington, Leonor Fini, Dorothea Tanning, etc.) who carved out a female-centric surreal aesthetic. These women often subverted male Surrealists’ motifs: for example, Carrington’s paintings place women in empowering mythical roles and contain cryptic personal symbols, which was her way of reclaiming the narrative. I see my visual journal in a similar light – it’s surreal, yes, in its free association and dreamlike juxtapositions, but it’s anchored in lived female experience.
Surrealist aesthetics valued climax, ecstasy, and madness as gateways to transcendence. I appropriate those themes but reinterpret them through a feminist lens. For instance, male Surrealists sometimes fetishized the image of a woman in orgasm as an exotic, otherworldly spectacle (often filtered through male pleasure). In contrast, my depiction of climax states tries to convey how it feels for the woman internally – the swirling colors behind closed eyes, the sense of dissolution of ego, or conversely a sharp clarity of the moment. By doing so, I shift the perspective from external to internal. This change of gaze is crucial: it means the art is not made to tantalize or shock a male audience (as a lot of surreal erotic art was), but to validate female sexual subjectivity. It turns what male fraternity culture would ridicule (female desire, female masturbation, etc.) into something sublime and worthy of artistic reverence. In my recent canvases, I’ve used spontaneous, curved lines and layered washes to evoke the pulsing sensations of pleasure – a visual language of touch rather than sight. This aligns with Irigaray’s idea that women’s pleasure is “diffuse” and multi-centric, not a single focal point to be objectified. The resulting images might not immediately announce “orgasm” to a viewer in the way a explicit realist image would, but they carry the affective charge of the experience. Surrealism taught us that art can communicate feeling without literal depiction; feminist aesthetics teaches that whose feeling is communicated, and how, matters politically.
Works Cited
Adamowicz, Elza. "Buñuel, Dalí, Un Chien Andalou." The Routledge Companion to Surrealism, edited by Kirsten Strom, Routledge, 2022.
Braidotti, Rosi. Nomadic Theory: The Portable Rosi Braidotti. Columbia UP, 2011.
Braidotti, Rosi. The Posthuman. Polity Press, 2013.
Chalmers, Madeleine. "Verbal Techniques." The Routledge Companion to Surrealism, edited by Kirsten Strom, Routledge, 2022.
Conrad, CA. Ecodeviance: (Soma)tic for the Future Wilderness. Wave Books, 2014.
Foucault, Michel. The Care of the Self: The History of Sexuality, Vol. 3. Translated by Robert Hurley, Vintage, 1988.
Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction. Translated by Robert Hurley, Vintage, 1990.
Ingold, Tim. Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture. Routledge, 2013.
Irigaray, Luce. Speculum of the Other Woman. Translated by Gillian C. Gill, Cornell UP, 1985.
Liang, Yiyan. Why You Don’t Show Your Anger? Exhibition Catalogue, 2023.
Lyford, Amy. Surrealist Masculinities: Gender Anxiety and Sexual Politics. University of California Press, 2007.
Parkinson, Gavin. "Masculinity." The Routledge Companion to Surrealism, edited by Kirsten Strom, Routledge, 2022.
Roussel, Raymond. Impressions of Africa. Translated by Mark Polizzotti, Dalkey Archive Press, 2011.
Roussel, Raymond. Locus Solus. Translated by Rupert Copeland Cunningham, Alma Books, 2017.
Semmel, Joan. "Self Image." Artist’s Statement, Brooklyn Museum Exhibition Catalogue, 2014.
Strom, Kirsten, editor. The Routledge Companion to Surrealism. Routledge, 2022.
Susik, Abigail. "Surrealist Visions of Androgyny." The Routledge Companion to Surrealism, edited by Kirsten Strom, Routledge, 2022.
Ueno, Chizuko. Misogyny. Translated by Beverly Yamamoto, Asahi Shimbun Publications, 2010.