Broadcast 23 January, 2025.
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In the early 20th century, several important intellectual women felt compelled by Freud and his new ideas about the psyche, human behavior, and sexuality. Among them was Princess Marie Bonaparte, the great grandniece of the infamous French emperor, who devoted her life and resources to psychoanalysis. One of the most notable aspects of her life and work remains her passionate inquiry into women’s sexuality and orgasm. Her major essays on the subject are collected in Female Sexuality, which was published in translation in the US in 1953, the same year the Kinsey Report was released. More intimately, and rather surprisingly for a woman so invested in psychoanalysis, Bonaparte submitted herself to three experimental surgeries to alter the placement of her clitoris, which she hoped would help her resolve her “frigidity” and allow her to experience orgasm.
This talk aims to return both psychoanalysis and Bonaparte to the ongoing conversation about feminist sexual politics, and, even more surprisingly perhaps, place her in conversation with contemporary feminist media. What might Bonaparte’s work reveal about the sudden proliferation of women’s orgasms on screen? What is the relationship between orgasms and death in feminist films? Does a focus on women’s pleasure infuse new life into feminist politics or threaten its political ambitions? Bonaparte’s explorations of female subjectivity and sexuality make her a thinker of surprising contemporary relevance, especially in the post #MeToo era when debates about the balance between feminist attention on sexual danger versus sexual pleasure abide.
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Speaker:
Shilyh Warren is an associate professor of Film Studies at UT Dallas and the Associate Dean of Graduate Studies in the Schools of Arts, Humanities, and Technology. She is the author of Subject to Reality: Women and Documentary (2019). Her research and publications focus primarily on documentary film and feminist studies. In the summer of 2022, Warren was a Writer in Residence at the Freud Museum in London, a research visit that was supported by a HeaARTS grant from UT Dallas.
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