The avant-gardes each devised novel and often contradictory ways of addressing the theme of sex: while Futurism attempted to strip sexuality from outdated sentimentalism, there is a stark contrast between the rampant misogyny of F.T. Marinetti’s manifestos and the ecstatic celebrations of female sexuality in Valentine de Saint-Point’s “Futurist Manifesto of Lust” (1913). In early modernist art movements like Fauvism, Cubism and Expressionism, female and male nudes frequently evoked an uninhibited sexuality. The works’ deformations of the figure and their integration of forms derived from non-western art broke with conventionally erotic academic models, while the turn to the “primitive,” even as it defied social norms, retained some of the prevalent gendered and racial preconceptions of the time. Dada and Surrealism deployed sexual provocation as an integral part of their épater le bourgeois strategies, using linguistic punning infused with sexual innuendo, the projection of human characteristics on objects and animals, and cross-dressing, to unsettle the unconscious and to deconstruct essentialized visions of sexual difference and heteronormative desire by underscoring the idea of gender as performative.

This international conference aims to prompt new reflections on the aesthetics and politics of sex in the modernist period—both in the sense of probing sexual difference and of mapping the uncharted territories of sexual desire.