Orgasmology: What Does the Orgasm Want?

What does the orgasm want?¹ Annamarie Jagose’s Orgasmology, a compelling intervention into debates, representations, and discourses about the human orgasm across the long twentieth-century, raises a range of fascinating issues and unexpected questions. I found myself attributing the elusive orgasm with its own motivations and desires. Does the orgasm have a plan of its own? Or is the orgasm in tutelage to the human subject? What does the orgasm desire? Ecstasy? Generation? Nothing? Can it even lead us astray? This may seem a strange way in which to think about orgasm. These questions enable us, however, to situate the act of orgasm so that it is not connected inextricably to a male or female body as is suggested by the phrase “the woman’s orgasm” or “the man’s orgasm.” Is the orgasm inevitably a humanist activity, confirming the identity of a rational and coherent subject, or is it possible to conceive of orgasm as ahuman or even inhuman?²

Jagose points to the “unruly” nature of the orgasm as a “scholarly object”:

Undisciplined by any tradition or field of scholarship, orgasm has been for me a volatile and unstable basis for a research project [that] might be understood instead as a complexly contradictory formation, potentially disruptive of any of the sedimenting critical frameworks by which we have grown accustomed to apprehending sexuality.

(2013, xii–xiii)

To think of an orgasm having its own desires is also disruptive of established critical positions and the assumed authority of anthropocentric discourses—nonhuman animals, it seems, also experience orgasms, though this is not part of the Orgasmology project. Nonetheless, orgasm has an evolutionary history that speaks through human and nonhuman animals. One of Jagose’s major aims is to establish a claim to orgasm from the perspective of queer theory, despite “queer theory’s established dismissal of orgasm as a critical figure” (xii). It is hard to imagine why queer theory adopts such a view. Representations of orgasm (in the cinema, for instance) certainly fail gloriously to construct the orgasm as a marker for heterosexual normativity and the civilized, rational subject (Wolfe 2010).³ If orgasm signifies an “unruly event”—as I fully agree—this suggests a representational moment that is disruptive and troublesome. It also aligns orgasm with the “unruly” woman, the woman who makes a spectacle of herself (Russo 1994).⁴ If the orgasm possesses its own desires, these may be inhuman, that is, impossible for us to know within an anthropocentric context that resists any attempt to destabilize the Human. Outside that context, however, the unruly subject may well understand orgasms’ pleasures—but not necessarily its desires.

As my own research is in the field of film and visual cultures, I was particularly interested in the chapter, “Face Off: Artistic and Medico-Sexological Visualizations of Orgasm,” which explores attempts to visualize orgasm in film and the medico-sexological fields with a focus on the tensions within modernity between sexuality, desire, and visual representation. At the same time, however, Jagose emphasizes the fact that orgasm inevitably resists “being constituted as a stable, visible object” (36). Orgasm’s “promiscuous availability to innumerable sightlines” has resulted in the “discursive ambivalence of orgasm” (36). In analyzing a series of films, mainstream and pornographic, which portray orgasm, Jagose sets out to explore the problem of representing female pleasure in film and the way in which the orgasm scene in mainstream cinema functions both as an “act of display” (154) and as an act of voyeurism. She draws on two different and influential accounts of cinematic spectatorship: Tom Gunning’s (1990) theory of the cinema of attractions and Laura Mulvey’s (1989) theory of voyeurism and the male gaze. As Jagose notes, however, these two accounts were not intended to be antithetical. Films with strong narrative trajectories may well contain acts of display, while films that focus on attraction as an organization strategy might also contain strong narrative sequences. Where does orgasm fit in relation to these different formations?

Jagose presents a detailed and fascinating analysis of the orgasm scene from the Czechoslovak film, Ekstase (1933). Directed by Gustav Machatý and...