Orgasmology by Annamarie Jagose.

• Author: Luminais, Misty
• Position: Book review

Jagose, Annamarie. Orgasmology. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012. xxii + 251 pages. Paper, $23.95.

In Orgasmology, cultural studies specialist Annamarie Jagose deploys queer theory to (dis)locate orgasm in the twentieth-century. Her main contention is that orgasm as a scholarly topic must be approached slantwise, since, as she explains, "queer theory--by which I mean those posthumanist and anti-identitarian critical approaches that are energized by thinking against the practices, temporalities, and modes of being through which sexuality has been normatively thought--has next to nothing to say of orgasm ... in which orgasm gets aligned with the normal, against which the queer identifies itself" (p. 1), especially against the backdrop of social theorists such as Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and Jean Baudrillard, who all find that orgasm loses its subversive potential, whether through normalization or as a denouement ending to what could be waves of pleasure. She thus strives to maintain the tension between orgasm as an experience of the body and as a subjective experience with a cache of ideology tied to it.

By arguing that in both cinema and sexology, "the alleged indexicality of the representational capture of embodied orgasm is crucial and crucial also to the subsequent crises of authenticity and objectivity that inevitably attend attempts to stabilize orgasm in the field of the visible" (p. xv), Jagose comes to the heart of the matter of why orgasm is such a slippery subject. Sexologists' quantifications and artists' interpretations all attempt to reify an experience that is at once singular and universal. Jagose goes out of her way to avoid romanticizing or mystifying orgasm, but queer theory demands an approach that sidles up on its subject, necessitating some obtuse relations.

One of the main goals of the book is to approach twentieth-century orgasm through apparently heteronormative discourse and reveal its queer interpretation. It is here that the author contributes most significantly to the literature. Excavating the beginning of the simultaneous orgasm craze through early marriage manuals coinciding with the marriage crisis at the beginning of the twentieth century and following its subsequent dismissal in later popular media, Jagose elucidates the creation of the "normal sexual subject" (p. 43), particularly of the ahistorical heterosexual variety. Under pressure from a society increasingly devoted to measuring and...