Relocating Marie Bonaparte's clitoris

The story of Marie Bonaparte’s clitoris reveals that sexual categories most often imagined today to form part of the most repressive or misogynist discourses of the past were, in fact, in their own time, those most riddled with ambiguity in relation to gender and to national politics. Marie Bonaparte and her early Freudian psychoanalytic views of female sexual frigidity may be profoundly irrecoverable as models for feminist understandings of pleasure, but within their historic context they reveal much about early twentieth-century discourses of gender differentiation and sexuality. This is the context in which Bonaparte’s ideas about frigidity and the clitoris will be considered here, since both the ambiguous gender politics of her work and the experimental genital surgery she underwent can be shown to belong to that era in which French culture saw multiple forms of anxiety about new forms of gender behaviour in the light of declining population in the aftermath of the First World War and preparation for the Second.