L’origine du monde

A certain part of the female body, the one that Gustave Courbet evoked in his painting The Origin of the World,has aroused and continues to arouse the interest of certain representatives of the male gender. This is how Dr. Kellogs, the inventor of cornflakes, was able to assert that masturbation causes cancer of the uterus and Dr. Baker Brown was able to advocate the eradication of female onanism by the ablation of the clitoris (the last one was performed in 1948!). If the medical profession does not use the back of the spoon, the philosophers are not left out. Jean-Paul Sartre can write “… the female sex… is a call to be, like all the holes”… Under the sharp pen of Liv Strömquist, a whole gallery of characters (fathers of the church and psychoanalysis, teachers, sexologists) whose theories and diagnoses had devastating consequences on the sexuality of the woman. After dissecting marriage as a historical and social construction in Les sentiments du prince Charles, Liv Strömquist lifts the veil on centuries of sexual repression and shatters all the misconceptions about the female sex, without forgetting to scratch – in passing – our culture’s obsession with binary sexuality. In this new comic book essay, Liv Strömquistsurprises us once again with the accuracy and clarity of her analysis, her frantic back and forth between past and present, her unexpected parallels and, above all, her omnipresent vitriolic humor.