Abstract
Centering the theories of French Post-structuralist Michel Foucault, this thesis seeks to add a new voice to scholarship done on the films of pivotal Italian director Federico Fellini (1920-1993). Arguing that prior academic work done on the sexuality of Fellini's films has inadequately focused on the latter half of the director's career, the thesis argues for a new and comprehensive view of Fellinian cinesexuality that more fully incorporates institutions of power and power relations as Foucault did. Exploring the role of medicine, pedagogy, confession, onanism, the mentally ill, the Catholic church, the family and more, this overview of nine of Fellini's most prominent films finds a strong and real connection between both men's thinking on sex. Incorporating in depth investigations of The White Sheik, I Vitelloni, La Strada, Nights of Cabiria, La Dolce Vita, 8 1/2, Juliet of the Spirits, Amarcord, and Casanova, the thesis seeks to reexamine a subject dominated by Jungian and Lacanian psychoanalytic analyses to arrive at a complex interpretation of the significance of sex in the Fellini cannon. Additionally, this project seeks to ponder the implications of feminist film theory for Fellini, whose complicated cinematic masculine self-hatred produced gripping depictions of patriarchy yet often portrayed women as shallow objects for male scopophilic consumption. Finding evidence throughout Fellini's filmography of Foucault's notions of the Deployment of Sexuality - the pedagogization of children's sex, the socialization of procreative behavior, the pyschiatrization of perverse pleasure, and the hysterization of women's bodies - Beyond Passions makes the case for a socially sexual Fellini whose gaze into the self and civilization produced trenchant subtexts which resonated far beyond the psychological interior.