Reframing the Occult-inspired Paintings of Leonora Carrington and Remedios Varo with Anti-Essentialist Methodology
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis examines the use of occult-inspired imagery in the paintings of Surrealist artists, Leonora Carrington, and Remedios Varo, through a feminist, anti-essentialist methodology. My approach departs from essentialist and universalist definitions of women that I identify in foundational scholarship on women Surrealists and offers a new approach by engaging with anti-essentialist theories. I argue that these artists draw on occult sources and folklore to convey images of womanhood that challenge the notion of a normative, fixed identity that essentialist ideologies necessitate. Further, I explain how their representations of typically “feminized” occult archetypes, such as the goddess and the witch, encourage anti-essentialist analyses by resisting and deconstructing the normative patriarchal stereotypes these artists encountered throughout their lives, including the limiting characterizations of women in the Surrealist movement. I employ feminist theories from Elizabeth Grosz, Diana Fuss, Simone de Beauvoir, and others to my anti-essentialist reading of their occult-inspired paintings. Finally, I use Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s concept of strategic essentialism to analyze how, in their paintings and magic practices, these artists drew on and simultaneously parodied the empowering yet essentialist myths about women that exist in occult traditions, such as the perception that women wield magical faculties and innate spiritual connections to the natural world. Ultimately, this thesis argues for the relevance and value of an anti-essentialist methodology in feminist interpretations of Varo’s and Carrington’s occult-inspired paintings.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.021 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".