Orgasmology

Next Wave: New Directions in Women's Studies

by Annamarie Jagose

For all its vaunted attention to sexuality, queer theory has had relatively little to say about sex, the material and psychic practices through which erotic gratification is sought. In Orgasmology , Annamarie Jagose takes orgasm as her queer scholarly object. From simultaneous to fake orgasms, from medical imaging to pornographic visualization, from impersonal sexual publics to domestic erotic intimacies, Jagose traces the career of orgasm across the twentieth century. Along the way, she examines marriage manuals of the 1920s and 1930s, designed to teach heterosexual couples how to achieve simultaneous orgasms; provides a queer reading of behavioral modification practices of the 1960s and 1970s, aimed at transforming gay men into heterosexuals; and demonstrates how representations of orgasm have shaped ideas about sexuality and sexual identity. A confident and often counterintuitive engagement with feminist and queer traditions of critical thought, Orgasmology affords fresh perspectives on not just sex, sexual orientation, and histories of sexuality, but also agency, ethics, intimacy, modernity, selfhood, and sociality. As modern subjects, we presume we already know everything there is to know about orgasm. This elegantly argued book suggests that orgasm still has plenty to teach us.

Genres: Nonfiction, Sexuality, Theory, History, Philosophy, Feminism

280 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2012

About the author

Annamarie Jagose is a writer of academic and fictional works.

She gained her PhD (Victoria University of Wellington) in 1992, and worked in the Department of English with Cultural Studies at the University of Melbourne before returning to New Zealand in 2003, where she was a Professor in the Department of Film, Television and Media Studies at the University of Auckland and Head of the department from 2008 to 2010.

Since 2011, she has been the Head of the School of Letters, Art and Media at the University of Sydney.

In 1994 she won the NZSA Best First Book Award for In Translation. In 2004 Slow Water won the Deutz Medal for Fiction in the Montana New Zealand Book Awards, as well as the Vance Palmer Prize for Fiction. It was also shortlisted for the Australian Miles Franklin Literary Award.

Reviews

[Paulina · Rating 2 out of 5]

"No orgasm without ideology". Of course, it seems obvious, the meeting between the sexual and the political, as if the two can ever be separated, and orgasm as the culmination of this encounter. Jagose questions the whole premise and invention of orgasm as the culmination, the peak, problematising the neo-liberal notion of sex as a means to access one's 'authentic self', i.e. an expression of self-hood. She traces the invention of the twentieth century orgasm - and what that means within the lines of queer theory, non-heteronormative sexual practices, etc.
The premise is beyond promising, but it never quite manages to deliver on its initial excitement. Excellent sources - Orgasmology works wonders as a path into works by Bersani, Berlant, Warner, Foucault, etc.

"Thinking the thingness of orgasm holds open a dialectic space for conceptual trade between the literal and the figural, the concrete and the ephemeral, the immanent and the trancendent. It allows orgasm to be captured as a complex and ambivalently figured discourse-effect, captured less in the definitive and disciplinary way that a fugitive is taken than in the way that large data sets are imagined to be "captured" by computational processes that nevertheless cannot always easily ascertain or necessarily comprehend the myriad actualities such data might express. Thus orgasm might be dialectically understood to figure simultaneously a number of apparently contradictory states or conditions that, far from being ordered by the neat logics of succession or even the clear-cut animosities of opposition, continue to play off each other, intersecting with and counterinforming each other, taking on each other's coloration in sometimes unexpected ways."

[Bill Brydon · Rating 4 out of 5]

notes are visible
"I am usefully reminded that the discursive ambivalence of orgasm is a consequence of its promiscuous availability to innumerable sightlines. If the place that orgasm holds open is “not really a place,” that is because, like the optical illusion it recalls, orgasm resists being constituted as a stable, visible object, refusing to be pinned down by anything that might mistake itself for normal or universal perception and focusing attention instead on the processes of perception themselves."

[Laura Grant · Rating 1 out of 5]

While there were insightful and enjoyable moments in this text it was - disappointingly -something I never ended up connecting with. While I normally enjoy difficult work I found this to be inaccessible, not due to very technical and subtle arguments, but instead the prose style tended to obfuscate the points the author was trying to make.

[Maxe · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book has a fantastic introduction and many perceptive lit reviews. The chapters themselves were hit or miss with me, but I have the sense that the book will continue to unfold for me months after finishing it.

[Jesse · Rating 2 out of 5]

Ironically aimless and anticlimactic

[Dee · Rating 3 out of 5]

I've been trying to get through the book since 2013 and finally managed it. In hindsight, it's clear that I couldn't stick with because I simply don't agree with Jagose in many of her chapters. The initial conceit of the study is awesome, but she just doesn't deliver. I wanted grand cultural stakes and queer feminist intervention; I got a close reading of a movie. So many opportunities for memorable critique squandered--especially the chapters on mutual orgasm and fake orgasm seemed to completely miss the point.

[Duke Press]

“[W]hile thinking too hard about achieving orgasm in the bedroom (…or kitchen…or office…or elsewhere) may foreclose its possibility, Jagose shows the opposite effect occurs in critical inquiry.”--Marcie Bianco, Lambda Literary Review

[Katy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Really heavy and academic, but still interesting. I need to read this one more thoroughly to get a handle on it.