Bloomsday in Melbourne: Seminar and Lunch

Bloomsday in Melbourne presents the 2025 Annual Bloomsday Seminar and Lunch on Sunday, June 16th from 10:15am to 2:15pm at the Rooftop Bar of the Arcadia Hotel.

Join us for two lively and entertaining presentations bringing Circe to life… and stay for a delicious lunch, with musical entertainment provided by Felix Meagher and Ewen Baker.

The Bloomsday 2025 Seminar

We have two informative papers:

Dr Manuela Hrasky, F.R.A.N.Z.C.P., ‘James Joyce And The New Sexology’

As James Joyce was growing up in the late 19th Century, the scientific study of sexuality was being pioneered by thinkers like Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Havelock Ellis and Sigmund Freud. Against the prevailing repressiveness of the Victorian era, these trailblazers explored sexual development and relationships, homosexuality, gender identity, masturbation, fetishism and the ‘perversions’ such as sadism and masochism. We know that Joyce, the committed iconoclast and experimental writer who revealed his sexual precociousness in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, was aware of the work of these psychologists, and in the Circe episode of Ulysses he brought to life a catalogue of case studies like theirs through his merciless exposition of the fears and fantasies of his everyman hero, Leopold Bloom. What can we glean from the Circe episode about Joyce and his relationship to this revolution in sexual psychology? Was he a ‘pervert’? A ‘degenerate’? Did he have an unhealthy interest in what Freud called ‘polymorphous perversity’? Or did he embrace it as a way to further his project of writing ‘an epic of the body’? How should history view him? As an idiosyncratic genius – a man out of time – or an emancipator of desire who helped pave the way for sexual liberation, gender fluidity, and body positivity?

Daniel Boyle, ‘The End of Monto’

2025 marks the hundredth anniversary of the closure of Monto, Dublin’s infamous brothel district that is the setting for Circe’s Carnival of Vice. Dan introduces us to the social history of the women who worked there, the often dangerous conditions they worked in, and how Joyce used his own personal knowledge of Dublin’s brothels in his ‘walk on the wild side.’

More information about the Bloomsday in Melbourne Festival can be found on https://www.bloomsdayinmelbourne.org.au/.