Jomo Kenyatta, Marie Bonaparte and Bronislaw Malinowski on Clitoridectomy and Female Sexuality

摘要

This article tells the story of a significant meeting in 1935 between the psychoanalyst Marie Bonaparte and the future President of Kenya, Jomo Kenyatta, then a student of anthropology under Bronislaw Malinowski at the London School of Economics. Their discussion centred on female ‘circumcision’, a topic being hotly debated in East Africa and in Great Britain among British colonialists and reformers and Kenyan cultural nationalists. Kenyatta became a key figure in the controversy. Bonaparte's interest in the matter came from her explorations of female sexuality: were all women bisexual as the two sites of the source of erotic pleasure – clitoris and vagina – seemed to indicate? Beyond her intellectual engagement, Bonaparte had a strong personal interest in clitoridectomy as she regarded herself as frigid and saw frigidity as an epidemic among Western women because of their exaggerated ‘masculinity’.