The Sex of the Situationist International

Abstract

In June 1958, Guy Debord, Gil Wolman, Michele Bernstein, and other founding members of the Situationist International (SI) published the first issue of internationale situationniste (IS). There, interspersed among essays on police brutality, functionalist architecture, and industrialization essays all invested with a clear sense of import and urgency are found photographs of sexy, flirtatious women. One stands underneath a shower, smiling as water trickles down her neck, while another wears nothing but a man's trench coat, an erotic accouterment through which she exposes a thigh and a tantalizing glimpse of decolletage. What are sexually charged images such as these doing in a periodical whose twelve issues published some of the most incisive critiques of alienation, capitalism, and spectacle along with astute analyses of current events like the Franco-Algerian War and the Watts Riots to appear after World War II? Readymade photographs of nude and semi-nude women are one of the leitmotifs of Situationist visual production. They embellish everything, from its collages and artist books to its films and publications. Nevertheless, these images have received only cursory attention from historians, and in the opinion of those who have addressed them, they constitute little more than a gratuitous sidebar to the group's more lofty, less compromised pursuits. Susan Suleiman's view, expressed in a footnote to her 1990 book Subversive Intent, typifies the scholarly response to date. The Situationists appear to have been more of a 'men's club' than the Surrealists, Suleiman writes. When they weren't ignoring women, they were treating them as sex objects in the most banal