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Counterfeit pleasures: fake orgasm and queer agency

2010; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 24; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/09502361003690849

1470-1308

Annamarie Jagose,

LGBTQ Health, Identity, and Policy

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Acknowledgements This essay is part of a larger project, 'Orgasmology', which has received generous support from both the University of Auckland in the form of a Vice-Chancellor's Strategic Research Development Award and the Royal Society of New Zealand in the form of a Marsden Fund Grant. I thank both institutions for their commitment to funding projects not easily recognisable in terms of either traditional humanities scholarship or the public good. Notes English translation from David Halperin, Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 89. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1, trans. Robert Hurley (Middlesex: Penguin, 1978), p. 6. 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. Guy Hocquenghem, Homosexual Desire, trans. Daniella Dangoor (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), p. 135. Leo Bersani, 'Is The Rectum A Grave?' October 43 (1987), p. 206, emphasis in original. Bersani, 'Is the Rectum a Grave?': 208, emphasis in original. For cruisers, see Henning Bech, When Men Meet: Homosexuality and Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997); George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Makings of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940 (New York: Basic Books, 1994); William Leap (ed.), Public Space/Gay Sex (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999); John Paul Ricco, The Logic of the Lure (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). 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; 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; 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. For barebackers, see Leo Bersani and Adam Phillips, Intimacies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), pp. 31–56; Tim Dean, Unlimited Intimacy: Reflections on the Subculture of Barebacking (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009); David Halperin, What Do Gay Men Want? An Essay on Sex, Risk, and Subjectivity (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007); Gregory Tomso, 'Viral Sex and the Politics of Life', South Atlantic Quarterly, 107.2 (2008), pp. 265–285. 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. 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. Rubin, 'Thinking Sex', p. 34. Rubin, 'Thinking Sex', pp. 10 and 9. Rubin, 'Thinking Sex', p. 35. Halperin, Saint Foucault, pp. 90–91. Michael Warner, The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life (New York: The Free Press, 1999), p. 178. Fadi Abou-Rihan, 'Queer Sites: Tools, Terrains, Theories', Canadian Review of Comparative Literature/Revue Canadienne de Littérature Comparée, 24.3 (1997), pp. 507. Brian Massumi, 'Deleuze, Guattari, and the Philosophy of Expression', Canadian Review of Comparative Literature/Revue Canadienne de Littérature Comparée, 24.3 (1997), p. 770. Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), pp. 9 and 6. Edelman, No Future, pp. 29–30. Edelman, No Future, p. 13. Edelman, No Future, p. 13. In his back-cover blurb for No Future Leo Bersani suggests rather that 'we could perhaps reproach [Edelman] only for not spelling out the mode in which we might survive our necessary assent to his argument'. Halperin, Saint Foucault, p. 26, emphasis in original. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, p. 157. Judith Butler, 'Revisiting Bodies and Pleasures', Theory, Culture & Society, 16.2 (1999), pp. 11 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. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, p. 157. 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. 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. 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. For more sustained discussions of the distinction Foucault makes between desire and pleasure, see Davidson, 'Foucault, Psychoanalysis, and Pleasure', pp. 45–49 and Halperin, Saint Foucault, pp. 92–97. Quoted in David Macey, The Lives of Michel Foucault: A Biography (New York: Partheon, 1993), p. 364. Michel Foucault, 'An Ethics of Pleasure', p. 264. 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. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, p. 155. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, p. 152, emphasis in original. Slavoj Zizek, 'The Ongoing "Soft" Revolution', Critical Inquiry, 30 (2004), p. 293, emphasis in original. 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. William H. Masters and Virginia E. Johnson, Human Sexual Response (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1966), p. 138. Masters and Johnson, Human Sexual Response, p. 134. 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. 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. Berlant and Warner, 'Sex in Public', p. 320. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, p. 157. 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. Michel Foucault, 'An Interview by Stephen Riggins' in Paul Rabinow (ed.), Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth: Essential Works of Foucault, 1954-1984, Vol. 1 (London: Penguin, 2000), p. 129. Foucault, 'An Interview by Stephen Riggins', p. 131. Lauren Berlant, 'Cruel Optimism', differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, 17 (2006), p. 21. Berlant, 'Cruel Optimism', pp. 23 and 35. Heather Love, Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), p. 26. Love, Feeling Backward, p. 27. Kathleen Stewart, Ordinary Affects (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), p. 86. 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. What would it mean anyway to call for fake orgasm? Despite the almost universal opprobrium it attracts, fake orgasm has no trouble maintaining itself as a sexual practice with a recognizable cultural profile. It's also worth pointing out, in this context, the spuriousness or at least rhetorically overloaded ambition of calling for any particular sexual practice, as if sadomasochism or monogamy or non-penetrative sex or abstinence – to name just a few practices recommended recently by different interest groups as having transformative capacities – were articulable strategies with fixed meanings that could transparently secure certain outcomes. As safer-sex programs in the context of HIV/AIDS education testify, the rearticulation of bodies and pleasures is no easy matter, even when the incentive for the change is grounded in epidemiological knowledges of viral transmission rather than less easily substantiated, more readily contested theories of social transformation. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), p. 12, emphasis in original.