Rachel Fesperman Presents at Alabama Symposium

First-year MA student Rachel Fesperman has been invited to present her paper “The Devil Behind: Castration, Sodomy, and the Sexuality of Uncanny Violence in Man Ray’s Monument à D.A.F. de Sade” at the 20th Annual Graduate Student Symposium in Art History, co-hosted by The University of Alabama and The University of Alabama at Birmingham. Fesperman presents her paper on Friday, March 6 at the Ferguson Student Center, UA, Tuscaloosa.

Fesperman’s paper investigates one of Man Ray’s photographs taken in interwar Paris, which captures many of Surrealism’s interests, including sexualized violence. His 1933 Monument à D.A.F. de Sade, originally occupying a full-page in Le Surréalisme au Service de la Révolution, memorializes the (in)famous eighteenth-century French libertine Donatien Alphonse François de Sade, known as the Marquis de Sade. Pairing a gelatin silver print of a woman’s posterior with a superimposed cross drawn on the image in ink, Man Ray’s work has been used largely as an example of sadism in Surrealism.