Queer Is? Queer Does?: Orgasmology’s Methods

One reason why orgasm might be, as Annamarie Jagose says, “good to think with” (2013, 36), is that its invitation to train critical attention on actual sex practices reveals the impasses of sexual knowledge. As snapshots of its twentieth-century fortunes unfold in the retrospective album that comprises Orgasmology, orgasm is shown to pose problems not only of representation and politics, signification and affect, but of what it means to know sex. Far from being the site of truth, of subjective authenticity, of empirical realness, orgasm, in Jagose’s terms, is an “irregular and unpredictable formation” (9) that opens onto the incoherence and obscurity, at once conceptual and visceral, of sex itself. Bringing us resolutely back to what we do not know, and perhaps cannot know, in the history and experiences of sex and sexuality, orgasm is not only a critical object—or, in Jagose’s oft-used phrase, a critical figure—but an epistemological conundrum.

Taking the obscurity of sexual knowledge as axiomatic, I propose that the intractability of orgasm as an object of inquiry can contribute to a consideration of what it might mean to think sex, not only as an issue of and for queer theory—one of Jagose’s manifest concerns—but as a problem of method. Queer studies has a number of strong theories from which practitioners derive their post-humanism and anti-foundationalism, anti-identitarianism and anti-normativity, anti-teleology and anti-sociality, as well as their historicisms and unhistoricisms. This is not to imply that such critical values are universally shared or uncontested, but that they have been obtained from and propounded out of distinct theoretical engagements.¹ The field of queer studies has spent considerably less energy thinking about what it might mean to espouse or enact a queer method.² Orgasmology, I submit, can help us do just that.

Jagose does not identify a methodological remit to her book, preferring instead to lay “a queer theoretical claim to orgasm” in the face of what she argues is “queer theory’s established dismissal of orgasm as a critical figure” (xii; emphasis mine). Neither “method” nor “methodology” appears in the book’s index, suggesting that for her project they do not rise to the level of an organizing “concept.”³ Jagose’s only explicit remark on method appears in her Introduction’s second sentence where she describes “[t]he global roaming system that has been the nearest thing to a methodology that queer theory has espoused to date, the way its attraction to the abject, the subaltern, the eccentric, and the minoritarian deems no subject so outré as to be altogether out of bounds” (1). Thus identifying the opportunistic, peripheral status of method in queer theory, this observation primarily provides the set-up for her explication of orgasm as the allegedly nugatory thing that queer theory has not thought important enough to theorize.

By focusing on what orgasm enjoins for the more mundane manufacture of method, and in using the work-a-day term “manufacture” to describe the labor involved, I propose that there may be analytical traction to be gained in exploring how queer studies approaches its research objects, as much as what it trains its attention on and why. Marking this distinction is by way of positing that, while theory and method may always be in implicit dialogue, queer studies has tended to collapse method into theory, substituting prevailing precepts (e.g., anti-identitarianism, anti-normativity) for a close examination of protocols and procedures. Countless discussions have considered what queer theory is (and is not) and what queer theory does (and should not do); few voices have centered their inquiry on how queer theory does what it does. In a field that vacillates between interdisciplinary and anti-disciplinary commitments, this evasion of method has precipitated a default syntax that results in a conflation of what queer is, what its hoped for effects are, and the means by which it achieves them.

In her description of “the dismissal of orgasm as inadequately queer” (2013, 2), Jagose critiques the presumptive knowledge of a field that is overly confident about its...