"What does the princess want?" Misogyny, Marie Bonaparte's "carnal community," and the pursuit of a scientific understanding of female pleasure.

Abstract

In 1924, Marie Bonaparte, who would later become a prominent French psychoanalyst, conducted one of the first scientific surveys of female sexual pleasure. In contemporary discourse, her work on women's sexuality is characterized as an obsession, attributed to her allegedly frigid nature. This article draws on recently released archival materials from the Library of Congress in Washington, DC, to replace Bonaparte in the history of sexology and women's struggles to make their voices heard in academic circles. Faced with misogyny and sometimes harassment, she was forced to bypass the male physician and create a "carnal network" through which she persuaded other women to be intimately measured and interrogated to understand the nature of female pleasure. Going back to the roots of Freud's famous question, "What does woman want?" and examining Bonaparte's quest for sexual freedom and her complex relationship with her famous analyst, we argue that Freud was not truly asking a question about femininity but rather warning his student about the restrictions women should place on themselves in the society. Overall, we suggest that Bonaparte's theses can be better understood through the conceptual framework of "situated knowledges" as articulated by Donna Haraway. Indeed, it is from her and other women's bodies that she produced a knowledge that competed with the dominating male gaze on women's bodies. Far from being the product of a frigid neurotic or a Freudian zealot, Bonaparte's work was an early manifestation of the collective empowerment of women in society throughout the 20th century. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).