Gazing With Animals: Auto-portraits Of Surrealist Women Artists

Abstract

Surrealist women artists have produced a multitude of works that transcend traditional gender and societal roles, presenting visions that blur the boundaries between humans and animals. These works challenge binary distinctions and hierarchical relationships, disrupting social norms and prompting a reimagining of human animal interactions. The self-portraits created by surrealist women, in which they depict themselves alongside animals, establish visual vocabularies that represent women and animal subjects in a non-anthropocentric manner based on interspecies companionship. This companionship depicted in these self-portraits can be considered as representations of Donna J. Haraway’s (2016) "becoming-with", and the autoportraits themselves can be considered as examples of terrapolis, an interspecies space in which becoming-with emerges. Within this framework, the study will analyze Leonora Carrington's (1938) Inn of the Dawn Horse, Frida Kahlo's (1940) Autorretrato con un Mono [Self Portrait with the Monkey], and Dorothea Tanning's (1942) Birthday as exemplary artworks. Rather than conceptualising the non-human as an object of desire or fear the aforementioned works represent becoming-with of species. This article argues that these states are produced not in the utopia/dystopia dichotomy, but on the ground of interspecies companionship established within the trouble of existence in the conditions of patriarchy.