What Orgasmology Teaches Us about Sex: A Dossier on Annamarie Jagose’s Orgasmology

Introduction

Readers well-versed in queer theory will surely hear in the title of this dossier on Annamarie Jagose’s Orgasmology the echo of a now-famous essay published in 1995. Co-authored by Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner, “What Does Queer Theory Teach Us about X?” (1995) appeared in PMLA as a guest column, nearly five years after Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet (1990) generated the sense that something critically new was making its way into politically engaged scholarship. Casting their intellectual investments less in the academic privileges of “theory” than in the more quotidian venues of “queer commentary,” Berlant and Warner pointedly sought to resist the welcoming institutionalization evinced by the PMLA’s editorial invitation. “The metadiscourse of ‘queer theory’ intends an academic object,” they wrote, “but queer commentary has vital precedents and collaborations in aesthetic genres and journalism. It cannot be assimilated to a single discourse, let alone a propositional program” (Berlant and Warner 1995, 343). In rejecting their nomination to establish the academic credentials of queer theory, Berlant and Warner offered their guest column as an “anti-encyclopedia entry,” one dedicated to the proposition that “queer theory is not the theory of anything in particular, and has no precise bibliographic shape” (1995, 344). The title emphasized this point by characterizing queer inquiry in pedagogical terms, with X marking the spot not of specific objects of study but of the questions that would anticipate and engage them. “We would like to cultivate a rigorous and intellectually generous critical culture without narrowing its field,” they explained. “We want to prevent the reduction of queer theory to a specialty or a metatheory” (1995, 344).

In the twenty-plus years that now separate our present from queer theory’s invited arrival into the pages of PMLA, scholars have largely remained faithful to Berlant and Warner’s anti-encyclopedic agenda. Celebrations of queer theory’s undisciplined sensibilities abound just as the anticipatory temporality of X has continued to propel scholarship in a variety of politically urgent and analytically experimental directions. Nevertheless, any critic attentive to the historical predicates of language knows that X is not without a presumptive referent altogether. In its sonic register, it bears the figure that the tantalizing rhetorics of nothing-in-particular might be said to simultaneously resist and conceal: sex. Berlant and Warner were clearly aware of this phonic conjuncture, relinquishing the value of X to sex only in their essay’s playful, provocative last sentence. “Of course,” they wrote, “we have deferred asking the crucial question: what does queer theory teach us about sex?” (349). In ending with this, “the” crucial question, and not “a” crucial question, “What Does Queer Theory Teach Us about X?” acknowledged both the promise and the burden that lived—and lives still—in queer commentary, where the study of sex is critically constitutive no matter how rhetorically postponed. For Berlant and Warner, this postponement was neither an avoidance nor annulment of the specificity of X as sex, as their publication of “Sex in Public” (1998) three years later would more than adequately affirm. It was instead a pointed performance of their pedagogical investment in queer commentary’s restless transgression of definitional and disciplinary forms.

But undermining authority in the moment it is conferred has its risks, especially when something named “theory” is at stake, with its precocious ability to keep rhetorical formulations alive without becoming distracted by the messy contingencies of the contexts that shaped them. It is perhaps no surprise, then, that what Berlant and Warner may have sought in postponing an answer to the last question they posed has sometimes been taken as a warrant for designating sex as queer theory’s least important question, one whose distinctly queer resonance was either mistaken from the outset or has been superseded by the political emergencies of a new century. Certainly, this is the core of the matter under consideration in After Sex? On Writing Since Queer Theory, a prominent 2007 issue of SAQ that staged a conversation about the disciplinary orientations of a field of study whose temporal...