Surrealist masculinities

the long version

"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 by and large 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. Featuring images that have never before been published, as well as new archival work on the origins and theory of surrealist visual production, 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." http://www.loc.gov/catdir/enhancements/fy0702/2006016240-d.html.