Surrealism has often been labeled as a misogynistic movement that sought to provide man with an avenue into a higher reality at the expense of the humanity of women. By perceiving the opposite sex as their muses, Surrealist men rendered women as mysterious sources of the marvelous, the name given to the higher realm, which they desired to attain. I propose that Surrealist women were empowered by the fact that ‘woman’, as an abstract concept, and femininity were synonymous with the marvelous. This entailed that Surrealist women had the advantage of being “sources of revelation, as provokers of wonder, dreams, and freedom,” whose intellectual agency allowed them to delve into their own femininity in order to attain the higher reality that Surrealism was devoted to unlocking. In contrast from Surrealist men who relied on the image of woman to lead them to this superior realm, Surrealist women were able to look within themselves in order to comprehend the marvelous. Conversely, Surrealist women often reversed the idea of the muse, by exploring their feminine unconscious through the objectification of men.

In 1955, American artist Dorothea Tanning abandoned her figurative Surrealist renderings of dream-like scenarios in favor of a complexly abstract and fragmented style of painting. With few exceptions, the ways in which Tanning’s later works function independently of her earlier paintings tends to be downplayed in the scholarship on her oeuvre. Equally sparse is the scholarship on Tanning’s dog imagery, which pervades her oeuvre but becomes most apparent in her later phase. This thesis seeks to shift attention toward Tanning’s later abstract paintings; it also seeks to fill the gap in scholarship on Tanning’s dogs. Specifically, through the study of five Tanning paintings from the late 1950s and 1960s, with the theoretical aid of Deleuze and Guattari’s conception of the becoming-animal, this thesis will investigate how Tanning’s post-1955 paintings create and promote new ways for viewers to think about the relations between humans and animals in the human-dominated modern world.

During the first half of the 20th century, several members of the Western surrealist movement traveled to Mexico with the intention of experiencing Mexican culture and gaining knowledge about the rituals and traditions of the Mexican indigenous population. They sought life experiences that could influence and confirm the surrealist’s ideological convictions. They wanted to internationalize their artistic movement by including successful Mexican artists. The ideology of Western surrealism connects ideas and practices from the human subconscious to situations of reality, where the subconscious is portrayed as a pure form of truth. The perception of reality positions it as the opposite of the dream. The dreamlike, irrational aspects depicted in the human subconscious become, according to logic, another version of reality and truth. The surrealist ideology identified with Sigmund Freud’s theory of psychoanalysis, which positions and portrays women in traditional gender roles in the history of arts, where femininity and the woman are seen as biased to male creativity. In works produced by male surrealists, there is an overrepresentation of sexualizing, idealizing and projecting erotic desires onto the female body.  This thesis aims to investigate how the artists Remedios Varo and Dorothea Tanning, who themselves identified with the surrealist movement, relate to the construction of femininity and the role of women within surrealism and society. The analysis is based on a selection of reproduced works by Remedios Varo and Dorothea Tanning where themes of marriage, motherhood and sexuality is explored. These three themes serve as points of reference for a feminist theoretical framework in a visual analysis. The results of the analysis serve as a starting point for a comparative analysis of the similarities and differences that arise between the visual languages of the artists from a transnational perspective. By examining the relationship between the Western surrealist movement and Mexico's art and cultural scene during the first half of the 20th century, the movement's social and political ideas are discussed in relation to Mexico's national and cultural traditions, with the intention of providing insight into the role of women in surrealism and society.  The result of the analysis indicates that Varo and Tanning oppose the idea of how surrealism portrayed femininity. Instead, they created an independent idea of femininity and identity in relation to surrealism's ideology of the subconscious, mystical, and dreamlike. This means that the representation of femininity in the works serves as a statement against surrealism's idea of the female artist, by emphasizing their artistic ideas and visual language. The analysis provides an understanding of how hybrid identities guide navigation in relation to multiple cultural identities, artistic practices, and challenge assumptions about nationality, gender roles, and artistic cultural belonging. From a theoretical perspective of transnational feminism, the results of the analysis are discussed in terms of how cultural hegemony and postcolonial factors affect cross-cultural artistic encounters and how the rolls of gender and female artists are shaped by patriarchal structures that transcend national borders.