Counterfeit pleasures: Fake orgasm and queer agency

Textual Practice

Volumn 24, Issue 3, 2010, Pages 517-539

  Jagose, Annamarie ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF AUCKLAND   (New Zealand)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 77952597733     PISSN: 0950236X     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/09502361003690849     Document Type: Review

References (57)

1. English translation from David Halperin, Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 89
2. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1, trans. Robert Hurley (Middlesex: Penguin, 1978), p. 6
3. How or where to draw the contours of political recognizability is itself a political question. As Judith Butler argues 'to become political, to act and speak in ways that are recognizably political, is to rely on a foreclosure of the very political field that is not subject to political scrutiny'. What desires or practices, claims or stakes get to count as political depends very much on how the field of the political is imagined and thus the constitution of that field is itself politically consequent. Judith Butler, 'Is Kinship Always Already Heterosexual?', differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, 13.1 (2002), p. 19
4. Guy Hocquenghem, Homosexual Desire, trans. Daniella Dangoor (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), p. 135
5. Leo Bersani, 'Is The Rectum A Grave?' October 43 (1987), p. 206, emphasis in original
6. Bersani, 'Is the Rectum a Grave?': 208, emphasis in original
7. For cruisers, see Henning Bech, When Men Meet: Homosexuality and Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997)
8. George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Makings of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940 (New York: Basic Books, 1994)
9. William Leap (ed.), Public Space/Gay Sex (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999)
10. John Paul Ricco, The Logic of the Lure (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002)
11. For dyke bois, see C. Jacob Hale, 'Leatherdyke Boys and their Daddies: How To Have Sex without Women or Men', Social Text, 15.3/4 (1997), pp. 223-236
12. Gayle Salamon, 'Boys of the Lex: Transgenderism and the Politics of Materiality', GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 12.4 (2006), pp. 575-597
13. Gill Valentine, '(Re)Negotiating the 'Heterosexual Street': Lesbian Productions of Space' in Nancy Duncan (ed.), BodySpace: Destabilizing Geographies of Sexuality and Gender (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 145-154
14. For barebackers, see Leo Bersani and Adam Phillips, Intimacies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), pp. 31-56
15. Tim Dean, Unlimited Intimacy: Reflections on the Subculture of Barebacking (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009)
16. David Halperin, What Do Gay Men Want? An Essay on Sex, Risk, and Subjectivity (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007)
17. Gregory Tomso, 'Viral Sex and the Politics of Life', South Atlantic Quarterly, 107.2 (2008), pp. 265-285
18. For the single but singularly influential queer showcasing of an erotic vomiter, see Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner, 'Sex in Public', in Lauren Berlant (ed.), Intimacy. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), pp. 328-329
19. Gayle Rubin, 'Thinking Sex' in Henry Abelove, David Halperin and Michèle Aina Barale (eds.), The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader. (New York: Routledge, 1993), pp. 13-14
20. Rubin, 'Thinking Sex', p. 34
21. Halperin, Saint Foucault, pp. 90-91
22. Michael Warner, The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life (New York: The Free Press, 1999), p. 178
23. Fadi Abou-Rihan, 'Queer Sites: Tools, Terrains, Theories', Canadian Review of Comparative Literature/Revue Canadienne de Littérature Comparée, 24.3 (1997), pp. 507
24. Brian Massumi, 'Deleuze, Guattari, and the Philosophy of Expression', Canadian Review of Comparative Literature/Revue Canadienne de Littérature Comparée, 24.3 (1997), p. 770
25. Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), pp. 9 and 6
26. Edelman, No Future, pp. 29-30
27. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, p. 157
28. Judith Butler, 'Revisiting Bodies and Pleasures', Theory, Culture & Society, 16.2 (1999), pp. 11
29. and Janet R. Jakobsen, 'Queer Is? Queer Does? Normativity and the Problem of Resistance', GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 4.4 (1998), pp. 514
30. Michel Foucault, 'Sade: Sergeant of Sex', in James Faubion (ed.), Aesthetics, Method and Epistemology: Essential Works of Foucault, 1954-1984, Vol. 2 (London: Penguin, 2000), p. 227
31. Michel Foucault, 'The End of the Monarchy of Sex' in Sylvère Lotringer (ed.), Foucault Live (Interviews, 1966-84) (New York: Semiotext[e], 1989), p. 144
32. Michel Foucault, 'The History of Sexuality', in Colin Gordon (ed.), trans. Leo Marshall, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977 (Brighton: Harvester, 1980), p. 191
33. For more sustained discussions of the distinction Foucault makes between desire and pleasure, see Davidson, 'Foucault, Psychoanalysis, and Pleasure', pp. 45-49
34. Quoted in David Macey, The Lives of Michel Foucault: A Biography (New York: Partheon, 1993), p. 364
35. Michel Foucault, 'An Ethics of Pleasure', p. 264
36. Michel Foucault, 'Sex, Power, and the Politics of Identity' in Paul Rabinow (ed.), Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth: Essential Works of Foucault, 1954-1984, Vol. 1. (London: Penguin, 2000), p. 169
37. Slavoj Zizek, 'The Ongoing "Soft" Revolution', Critical Inquiry, 30 (2004), p. 293, emphasis in original
38. Defending his data by drawing attention to the very high coefficients of correlation between what husbands and wives say, Kinsey is satisfied that he can demonstrate the veracity of independently collected data in every category of inquiry but two, one of which concerns the frequency of female orgasm. In this instance, Kinsey notes, 'the male believes that his female partner experiences orgasm more often than she herself reports; but it is to be noted that the wife sometimes deceives her husband deliberately on that point'. Less concerned with human sexual behavior at this point than the robustness of his research data, Kinsey offers no analysis of the circumstances under which wives mislead their husbands about the occurrence of their own orgasms, his lack of interest in this direction reinforcing a sense that, however regrettable for statistical accuracy, fake orgasm is a wifely commonplace and commonly undetected on the part of husbands. Alfred C. Kinsey, Wardell B. Pomeroy and Clyde E. Martin, Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1953), pp. 127-128
39. William H. Masters and Virginia E. Johnson, Human Sexual Response (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1966), p. 138
40. Masters and Johnson, Human Sexual Response, p. 134
41. Nearly ten years later and despite the massive popularization of their findings, Masters and Johnson were still inveighing against fake orgasm although this time on moral rather than pragmatic grounds: '"Pretending" or "faking" are euphemisms for "lying" and lying divides people. This is especially true in bed'. William Masters and Virginia Johnson, The Pleasure Bond: A New Look at Sexuality and Commitment (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1975), p. 247
42. For an account that, under cover of historically overarching discourses of female insincerity, conflates twentieth-century fake orgasm with early modern simulations of virginity, see Marjorie Garber, Symptoms of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1998), pp. 217-235
43. Berlant and Warner, 'Sex in Public', p. 320
44. Elisabeth A. Lloyd, The Case of the Female Orgasm: Bias in the Science of Evolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), pp. 25 and 36
45. Lauren Berlant notes this tendency of female testimony never to arrive on the public scene: 'When any woman testifies publicly "as woman" she is unknown: her knowledge is marked as that which public norms have never absorbed, even when there's nothing new about the particular news she brings' Lauren Berlant, 'Trauma and Ineloquence', Cultural Values, 5.1 (2001), p. 47
46. The widespread, if unassimilated, knowledge that penetrative intercourse unreliably secures female sexual pleasure therefore constitutes one of the tightly impacted contradictions that structure the heart of modern heterosexuality. Another is the idea that women want men to talk to them more while men want women to have sex with them more. For a brilliant reading of this gendered complaint, see Candace Vogler, 'Sex and Talk' in Lauren Berlant (ed.), Intimacy. (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2000), pp. 48-85. Vogler argues that sex and talk can be thought of as similar strategies for accessing a depersonalized relation to the self, an intimacy that is valued in terms of its capacity to unloose the self from itself rather than its ability to restore the self to itself or manufacture a better self. Although Vogler's essay takes up the gendered malaise that characterizes case-study heterosexuality via an interrogation of Immanuel Kant's prioritization of rationality and will for ethical conduct, her promotion of a sexual subjectivity imagined in a mode of impersonality over a fully self-knowing subject forged in the crucible of interpersonal communication has been useful for my thinking in the next section of this essay about the implications of Foucault's ethics of self-fashioning for fake orgasm
47. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, 'Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading; or, You're So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Introduction Is about You' in Eve Korofrky Sedgwick (ed.), Novel Gazing: Queer Readings in Fiction (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), p. 24
48. There have been feminist attempts, of course, to code heterosexual intercourse otherwise, as a figure for gendered relations of dominance and inequity. See, for example, Andrea Dworkin, Intercourse (New York: Free Press, 1987). While these perspectives have remained culturally marginal, they receive a kind of back-handed vernacular recognition in the everyday variations on fuck you that circulate as expressions of contemptuous dismissal
49. Foucault argues as much in relation to the historic situatedness of homosexuality when he writes 'Homosexuality is an historic occasion to re-open affective and relational virtualities, not so much through the intrinsic qualities of the homosexual, but due to the biases against the position he occupies'. Foucault, 'Friendship as a Way of Life', p. 207
50. Foucault, 'An Interview by Stephen Riggins', p. 131
51. Lauren Berlant, 'Cruel Optimism', differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, 17 (2006), p. 21
52. Berlant, 'Cruel Optimism', pp. 23 and 35
53. Heather Love, Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), p. 26
54. Love, Feeling Backward, p. 27
55. Kathleen Stewart, Ordinary Affects (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), p. 86
56. See also Lauren Berlant's recent suggestion that 'lateral agency', by which she means 'an activity of maintenance, not making; fantasy, without grandiosity; sentience, without full intentionality; inconsistency, without shattering; embodying, alongside embodiment', might be a more useful concept than sovereignty for thinking about the constrained spaces in which many subjects under late capitalism get by. Lauren Berlant, 'Slow Death (Sovereignty, Obesity, Lateral Agency)', Critical Inquiry, 33 (2007), p. 759
57. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), p. 12, emphasis in original