Maternities: Dorothea Tanning's Aesthetics of Touch

Abstract

This essay explores the concern in Dorothea Tanning's work of the late 1960s and early 1970s with touch, contiguity, and the concept of maternity. In addition to a series of paintings and drawings that connote intimacy and whose titles allude to maternity, during this period Tanning also gave form to a group of soft sculptures, which similarly evince a preoccupation with closeness and touch, and indicate a form of intimacy that challenges the limits of the individual subject. Tanning's engagement with these themes, the essay argues, resonates closely with the feminist poetics developed around the same time by poststructuralist theorists such as Hélène Cixous, Julia Kristeva, and Luce Irigaray. I propose that Irigaray's theories of maternity, subjectivity, and non-phallocentric language offer a particularly rich set of analytical tools with which to understand Tanning's work. Through establishing the affinities between Tanning and Irigaray, I suggest, we can better understand the intellectual currents that flowed between poststructuralist feminism and surrealist women's work of this period.