Description
Book SynopsisIn this long-awaited work, the queer theorist Annamarie Jagose demonstrates that attention to orgasm as an object of queer and feminist thought reveals much about gender, agency, history, and modernity.
Trade Review“[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 *
“Altogether, I did learn more about orgasms. As a piece of cultural criticism, it is scholarly and carefully wrought. . . . The strength of Jagose’s book lies not in the repetition of this romantic position but rather in its careful trace of the human orgasm in social, medical and representational history. ‘Seeing’ orgasm’s trace in this way is quite handy.” -- Sally R. Munt * Times Higher Education *
“The diversity of the archival material covered in
Orgasmology is the book’s greatest strength. Jagose’s method is an intricate meshwork of discourses, unified by her focus on the same elusive object. . . . Jagose offers a fascinating tour of the orgasm in the 20th-century. . . .” -- Sand Avidar-Walzer * Los Angeles Review of Books *
“Orgasmology is a frothy series of engagements with the cultural-bodily terrain of orgasm. . . . A good gift for the feminist-studies grad student who doesn’t have time for orgasms.” -- Ela Przbylo * Bitch *
“
Orgasmology itself enacts the discursive diversity and productivity that characterizes twentieth-century orgasm. Eloquently written, and supple and wide-ranging in its argument, the book is bound to produce galvanizing effects on scholars working in queer theory, gender studies and cultural studies.” -- Guy Davidson * Australian Humanities Review *
“Jagose’s interdisciplinary archive – spanning science, philosophy, the arts, and media – structurally parallels the multivalence of her research subject and offers exciting contributions to the fields of feminist and queer studies. . . . Jagose’s commitment to thinking orgasm in terms of a beyond, of elsewheres previously unknown, is compelling, exciting, and inspiring for anyone interested in busting the paradigms, and reinventing the possibilities, of the sexual and indeed the human.” -- Ben Bagocius * Make *
"Jagose models the payoff of looking at again, more, differently, or sideways after you (think that you) have taken a stance on something — including orgasms. As I read
Orgasmology, I kept pausing to revisit texts and cultural moments that I have long found generative for queer thinking that either looked differently interesting from the orgasm out or from the orgasm revisited with the benefit of Jagose’seye toward history, representation, science, instruction, and politics." -- Erica Rand * GLQ *
Table of ContentsPreface xi
Acknowledgments xix
Introduction
. Orgasm and the Long Twentieth Century 1
1.
About Time: Simultaneous Orgasm and Sexual Normalcy 40
2. Straight Woman / Gay Man: Orgasm and the Double Blind of Modern Sex 78
3. Behaviorism's Queer Trace: Sexuality and Orgasmic Reconditioning 106
4. Face Off: Artistic and Medico-Sexological Visualizations of Orgasm 135
5. Counterfeit Pleasures: Fake Orgasm and Queer Agency 175
Coda. Orgasm's End 207
Works Cited 217
Index 239
