Conference: Solitary Pleasures in art and psychoanalysis- Florence Schechter

Florence Schechter
Why The World Needs A Vagina Museum

There is a penis museum in Iceland, but no vagina equivalent anywhere in the world. Florence discusses her experience in why she chose to set up the world's first bricks and mortar vagina museum and the strange reactions she's got along the way.

Florence Schechter is a Science Communicator and Director of The Vagina Museum.

Solitary Pleasures in art and psychoanalysis is a day-long conference to accompany Solitary Pleasures, a group exhibition at the Freud Museum.

The conference, like the exhibition, reveals masturbation as a topic that can transform our understanding of human subjectivity and sexuality. Perhaps the most common form of human eroticism, it is also one of the least theorised. The conference will explore our complex sexual, erotic, and intimate encounters with ourselves and one another by viewing masturbation as an all-inclusive practice – gay, lesbian, heterosexual, bisexual, trans, queer, +, offering possibilities of a shared exchange and an intimate encounter between couples, lovers and strangers in ways that redefine desires and eroticism’s possibilities.

Conference themes:

History – the cultural history of masturbation
Talking – masturbation in clinical practice and literature
Educating – masturbation in sexual health and wellbeing
Making – masturbation in creativity and art practice