Stuck on You

A book positively glutinous with sticky moments, Orgasmology opens with the announcement that writing it afforded the author a “momentarily suckering attraction to those words that ha[d] even some passing morphological resemblance” to the figure that Annamarie Jagose possessively proclaims “her” scholarly object: orgasm (2013, xi). These attachments to orgasm’s graphic or sonic proxies are short-lived. Yet their transience only underlines all the more emphatically the tenacity of the book’s attachment to “orgasm,” its guiding belief in “the value of sticking with [this] unlikely scholarly object, attending to the thick textures of its discursive formulations” (xvi; emphasis added). “Sticking with” things, it seems, is what Jagose does best. Tracing the cultural and critical career of orgasm across a range of twentieth-century scenes, texts, and archives—from Guillaume-Benjamin Duchenne’s notorious photographic studies of the facial spasms associated with orgasm, to the popular early twentieth-century genre of the marriage manual—Orgasmology is everywhere marked by its adherence to the figure it takes as its organizing object. And this allegiance to orgasm both reflects and facilitates a more striking allegiance—to some of the time-honored precepts of the queer theoretical program. While orgasm’s reputation as the sexual hallmark of “quiescent [hetero-]normativity” (xiii) means it will never be spoilt for queer critical champions, it also sets orgasm alongside, say, the wedding-industrial complex and Doris Day’s star persona as a figure whose very implication in fantasies of sexual and social closure prime it for queer critical re-reading.¹ Orgasmology’s fidelity to a recognizably queer body of scholarly objects is matched by its fidelity to a recognizably queer scholarly method. In its “systematic demonstration that orgasm is the deconstruction of sex,” to quote David Halperin’s back-cover blurb for the book, Orgasmology delivers a master class in a practice whose signature critical maneuver is essentially a deconstructive one—the demonstration that marginalized sexual and social practices and objects, like the orgasm, may unravel the ties that knit together chromosomal sex, gender, and desire.

What makes this kind of theoretical “stickiness” noteworthy, however, is how atypical it is of queer theory today, when so much of the theoretical energy propelling queer theoretical work is aimed at delaminating “queer” from the practices and objects with which that body of scholarship has traditionally been identified. From Judith Butler’s turn to justice and human rights and Eve Sedgwick’s later work on affect, Buddhism and pedagogy, to recent queer considerations of empire, race, migration, geography, activism, and class, many of queer theory’s heavy-hitters have lately sought to direct their attention away from the objects that initially galvanized work in the field.² Unsurprisingly, perhaps, the titles of issues of recent journals and books in the field tremble with anxious interrogatives: After Sex? wonders Janet Halley and Andrew Parker’s 2011 anthology of critical writing “after” queer theory; “What’s Queer about Queer Studies Now?” inquires the influential 2005 issue of Social Text. From an outsider’s point of view, these astonishing “swerves in attention” (Jagose 2013, 13) come at an unexpected moment, which is to say, just as the field completes its transition from radical disciplinary renegade to recognized disciplinary insider. Yet the fact that queer scholars bridle at an institutional uptake that scholars in other fields might celebrate should come as little surprise. Forged in the activist moment of the early 1990s and fired by a desire to think against the models by which sexuality has conventionally been apprehended, queer theory has tended to put great stock in movement and transformation as a rhetorical and political ideal, especially, as Brad Epps observes, “when it is movement against, beyond, or away from rules and regulations, norms and conventions, borders and limits” (2001, 413). In keeping with what Elizabeth Stephens identifies as a wider tendency across critical theory to associate fixity “with the conservative and normative, while the fluid is associated with the positive, progressive and resistant” (2014, 187), queer theory has tended, according to Epps, to elevate fluidity to the status of a “fetish” (2001, 419).

Yet if this muted but...