EQUALITY AND SOLIDARITY WITH OUR SISTERS
Eleven notes on surrealism and feminism
1-Surrealism is radically egalitarian. It draws its strength from the unconscious, from automatism and
dreams all of which are within everyone’s reach. These sources offer wonders, games, connections, sublimations that go in the direction of equality for all human beings.
It is no coincidence that, in visual creations, Surrealism is passionate about popular art -that institutions generally call it as “raw art” or “naïve art” depending on the case,- in particular for the art
of mad people and “mediums” of same as for the so-called “primary” tribal arts. Surrealism is inspired
by all these arts.
2- Sublime love is at the heart of poetry. It can bracket the social positions of beings. However, it does not alone erase inequalities or the dominations that society produce.
3- Women’s struggle for equality is as beautiful as it is necessary for the dissolution of patriarchy as
well as the dissolution of the patriarchal family and for the construction of an egalitarian society.
4- Certain men can refuse, to a certain extent, the poisonous, abject privileges, which the capitalist
patriarchy offers them to use against women. They can, at certain times, join the feminist struggle.
However, this struggle nonetheless belongs to the women, to them alone, who engage in it.
5- Like surrealism, feminism is universalist. Fight against male domination, for equality in all points of view, against forced procreation, against the constraint on the heterosexuality of women and for sisterhood, against housework, against violence against women (including women murders, pornographic industry, harassment, rape, etc.) is also giving more chance to beauty, freedom, love.
6- Like feminism, surrealism tends to show solidarity with the struggles of the proletariat, indigenous peoples and all exploited peoples including with those of youth, as well as all the oppressed.
7- Everyone is free in their will to orient themselves – within the limits of possibilities – with the social gender of their choice and with an erotic, non-destructive orientation of their choice. The fact remains
that, from a surrealist and feminist point of view, it is not fundamentally a question of adjusting the social genders division to make it more malleable, more flexible, more relocatable, and more open to mixtures and more trouble. This social division must be radically eliminated.
8- The removal of social divisions cannot be decreed, nor “performed”. They require deep and long collective struggles for the equality of all.
9- Surrealist civilization will only be built on the foundations of an essentially egalitarian society. The development of this civilization also requires an abolition of alienated labor, leaving the field open to
passionate creation in a humanity reconciled with itself, as with nature, which does not define it, but
from which it emerges.
10- Surrealism has always been for the suppression of the patriarchal family. However, neither Breton
nor the surrealist women and men who developed our movement in the early days were feminists in
the strict sense: they could not have been. The first wave of feminism was over, at least in Europe,
while the second wave was far from being in sight. Even in 1949, the seminal book “The Second Sex”
by Simone De Beauvoir, which had a great and salubriousimpact, however, did not provide any
perspective of struggle for women. Totally conditioning gender equality on a basis of proletarian
revolution, this book notes, with laudable force although in a very prosaic manner, a particular misery
imposed on women. Breton and his friends knew this misery very well and condemned it.
11- Since the birth of the second wave of feminism, everything has changed. Today, surrealism is
feminist or it is not and it is up to surrealist women to say how it should be.
Ody Saban, 2024
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