Surrealist Sabotage and the War on Work by Abigail Susik;

Author:Abigail Susik;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Manchester University Press

The surrealist seamstress and the hypertrophic clitoris

Domínguez’s artistic interest in the motif of an autoerotic seamstress was not an isolated case. Historian Thomas Laqueur has argued that from the 1920s, avant-garde circles were some of the first to begin to celebrate masturbation, a narcissistic, ‘solipsistic pleasure’, as a sign of virtuous ‘self-governance and self-control’, which was at the same time a sign of the collapse of ‘market discipline’ and the reality principle.82 Accordingly, Domínguez’s Machine à coudre électro-sexuelle creates a metaphor for the surrealist work of art as autonomously self-pleasuring with fragments of the recently outdated myth about the erotogenic properties of sewing-machine work. What is the significance of this? Has the artist chosen this outmoded and reactionary medical discourse as the topic of his painting in order to link, consciously or unconsciously, the tradition of hysteria celebrated by the surrealists to the still-contentious topic of travail féminin (female labour)? If so, Domínguez revealed a contemporaneous, agentic counterpart to the confined hysteric via the working woman, who, although tied to her machine and experiencing involuntary orgasmic paroxysms, nevertheless achieves some measure of self-gratification and self-mastery through a deregulated relationship to her work tool.

While the supposed autoerotic activity of the couturière endangered her gynaecological and moral health, it was the passivity of the hysteric during therapeutic treatments that supposedly promised recovery. Seen in this light, the couturière harboured threatening associations with women’s sexual agency and autonomy in addition to the faint glimmer of hope that her exploitative wage labour held for the possibility of future economic independence. It was this explosive character of the sewing machine as an emblematic tool of potentially liberating labour and sexuality that may have appealed to Domínguez when he painted Machine à coudre électro-sexuelle in 1934–35, the period in which thousands of French seamstresses, united under a single garment workers’ union of roughly 80,000 members, led another successful strike.83 In a psychosocially symbolic scene that, on a latent or partially concealed visual plane, conflates women’s labour histories and medical histories of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Domínguez’s couturière acquiesces to the erotic machinations of her stimulating apparatus. The Machine à coudre électro-sexuelle is a device for convulsing history, wherein the signified oppression of women’s bodies in exploitative wage labour and medical science simultaneously folds over into the stirrings of women’s struggle for liberation and autonomy.

The phrase électro-sexuelle was invented by Domínguez. Having no given meaning, it communicates in an unfamiliar phraseology the basic idea that this sewing machine is an electrical device meant for sexual stimulation, électrostimulation sexuelle. Even though the painting’s composition evokes a treadle apparatus – with the two clawed feet placed beneath the recumbent nude – rather than an electric model from the twentieth century, the sewing machine’s history of association with masturbation in France forges a conceptual link with the slightly later inception of a market for electronic massage devices that were sometimes used for sexual pleasure or orgasmic release at the end of the nineteenth century. Treadle sewing machines remained

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