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  • Unqueerness
  • Benjamin Kahan (bio)

Building on the inventiveness and glowing theoretical insight of Annamarie Jagose’s Orgasmology, I want to consider the meaning and value of an orgasmology for sexuality studies. In the first pages of the preface, Jagose writes of “an absence of a field of anything like orgasm studies” (2013, xii). Immediately following this observation, she notes that this is not to “bewail the absence of such a field nor still less to propose to inaugurate one” (xii). My own contribution to this dossier instead seeks to trace the possible effects on sexuality studies of precisely such an inauguration. I argue that a critical orgasmology promises to bolster sexuality studies in three ways. First, it enables an increased focus on sexual formations and domains that have been inassimilable to sexuality studies’ most prominent subset: queer theory. Second, it encourages scholars to theorize sex as a shaping force of modernity rather than what Jagose terms “a cipher for other, more serious, matters” (13). Third, it enables a reconsideration of narratives of sex by interrupting the conflation of orgasm with sexual completion.

In her “Introduction: Orgasm and the Long Twentieth Century,” Jagose claims that “orgasm was constituted by queer theory as its bad object” (9). In a word, it embodies what she calls “unqueerness” (14). Jagose traces the supposed unqueerness of orgasm—which she describes as a “figure for quiescent normativity” (xiii)—through the work of a range of figures, but it is Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze who are most influential. As she discusses, Foucault characterizes the “lyricism of orgasm” as an aspect of sexuality’s “normalizing utilization” (2); Deleuze laments desire’s measurement “as a function of a unit that is not its own, which will be pleasure or the orgasm, which assures its discharge” (5n11).1 Both these valences are captured in the original usage of the word “orgasmology” which was coined by André Béjin in 1982 “to describe a historic shift in the sexological project of the mid-twentieth century” in which orgasm was utilized as a “rationalized unit of calculation” (Jagose 2013, 37n87). Here, orgasm becomes a tool to standardize and stabilize sex. The work of Alfred Kinsey, Jagose argues, was particularly important in this process. Jagose writes, “[U]nless it [sexual [End Page 162] practice] ends in orgasm, sexual activity does not count, in the literal statistical sense” (29). To borrow a phrase from Ernesto Javier Martinez, this “obsessive fuck counting” “aligns orgasm with normalizing, disciplinary power” (2013, 3), limiting the domain of the sexual and functioning as the very tool through which the processes of normalization occur (2).

If these difficulties make orgasm a bad object for queer theory, they are also, in part, what make Orgasmology such a good book. Recent years have seen queer theory take what Heather Love calls a “backward turn” toward objects that feel unredeemable, unlovable, beyond rescue (2007, 5). Ugly feelings, normalcy, failure. And of course, orgasm. Jagose’s work is less redemptive than that associated with the backward turn. She rejects the “theoretical aversion for orgasm” and instead persists “in thinking with and through orgasm” (2013, 9) to assert orgasm’s “capacity to reorder axiomatic knowledges, to make a different sense of the schematic systems by which sexuality is defined and investigated” (38). The book is very successful at just such a reordering, particularly in relation to heterosexuality and the associated orgasmic practices of simultaneous orgasm and fake orgasm. Thus, a critical orgasmology helps us to understand why these practices have been understood as unqueer and to recover their queerness to expand the domain of queer sexuality.

These practices point us to a second potentiality of an orgasmology: namely, its ability to bring “out the sex in sexuality studies” and in modernity in particular (11). In the first chapter, “About Time: Simultaneous Orgasm and Sexual Normalcy,” Jagose reads “the widespread advocacy of simultaneous orgasm” in marital advice literature as a symptomatic response to the “marriage crisis,” which witnessed a dramatic drop in the marriage rate from the end of the nineteenth until the advent of the Great Depression (41). Jagose explores how simultaneous orgasm became “the expression par excellence of erotic mutuality” (42), contending that...

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