Orgasm and Queer Theory in the Twentieth Century

There is a queer script recognizable in Annamarie Jagose’s (2013) remarkable book, Orgasmology. It runs as follows: a naturalized, repressed, dismissed, or ignored object is found, then claimed for critical scrutiny; here, the object is orgasm. The script assumes that the productivity of the object lies in the excesses and uncertainties of meaning that it can generate. In certain parts of Orgasmology, repeating and accumulating terms such as ambiguity, volatility, instability, complexity, contradiction, and multivalence add up to establish a sense of generalized ambivalence. That ambivalence is taken for granted as a critical accomplishment in its own right. Orgasm is queer because it does not make sense, or alternately because it makes too much sense.¹

If I characterize this thread of Orgasmology as a script within queer theory, I do so, I realize, in a fairly generalizing and reductive manner. However, queer theory has been around for long enough now to admit of conventional, even stereotypical, elements and aspects—in addition to innumerable variations and nuances, of course. The generic form of queer theory is not reducible to the sum of individual intentions and positions; yet it is effective nonetheless. However, the main reason I want to point out the presence of the queer ambivalence script is to show that it does not set-up or represent Jagose’s book as a whole, nor account for Orgasmology’s most thought-provoking contributions. Strikingly, the invocation of a generalized orgasmic ambiguity does not proceed from the script to inform the book’s major arguments and analyses.² The word cloud of volatility, contradiction, and multivalence remains contained to specific portions of the book: to the preface, introduction, and coda.

For, far from reveling in a generalized ambivalence, the main chapters of Orgasmology offer lucid analyses of how and why orgasm yielded precisely this or that relevance at this or that concrete historical juncture. Indeed, Jagose’s work on orgasm is firmly contextualized in what she calls the West’s “long” twentieth century, running from the late-nineteenth to the present (Jagose 2013, 19). Rather than a celebration of the categorical resistance of orgasm to logic that the titular notion of an “orgasmology” seems to promise, the chapters offer historical specificity and precision in abundance. In that regard, the original working title of “Twentieth-Century Orgasm,” signaling a limited but precise historicity, would have served as a better frame for the book (18). The rarefied non-logic suggested by “orgasmology” sets a misleading tone.

Of course, the mismatch between the queer ambivalence frame and the historical book pinpoints a more general incompatibility between two of queer theory’s main sources of inspiration, deconstruction and Foucauldian genealogy. I am not suggesting that queer theory should not draw on multiple sources. But unreflected shifts from the one to the other are less productive, easily leading to the charge of theoretical riffing or sampling.

In a deconstructionist framework, orgasm can serve as an object that resists or exceeds logic categorically. In a Foucauldian perspective, however, the object’s significance—ambiguous or otherwise—requires historical bearings. The topic remains the same but the methodological object changes. In the case of the third source both queer theory and Jagose draw on—psychoanalysis—orgasm transforms yet again to become an object granting access to the (negative) truth of human sexuality and subjectivity (more on this below). The critical productivity of the object should not depend on methodological shape-shifting. What kind of object can and should orgasm be for queer theory?

There is another striking way in which Jagose’s book departs from the script it only partly mobilizes, and to me, this is where Orgasmology becomes most thought-provoking and exciting. While Jagose criticizes ideological renditions of orgasm at length, she does not proceed from that to recommend a truer or more authentic form of climaxing. Her ideology criticism does not install a radical practice to usher in a new reality; the book does not enjoin us to come more, less, not at all, or differently to escape from power and doxa. Jagose does not envisage a revealed orgasmic potential to...