Feminist Formations

“No orgasm without ideology.”

—David Halperin, “Historicizing the Sexual Body”

Invited to respond to a dossier such as this is, perhaps inevitably, to feel insufficient to the occasion. As its reader, I become an instantiation of the much-bruited death of the author. It is not—or not only—Antipodean modesty that makes me recall this poststructuralist tag and its efficient dismissal of the author as the privileged source of textual meaning. Rather, I mean to recall it in the fuller sense with which it has recently been freighted by one of the dossier’s contributors, Jane Gallop. In The Deaths of the Author: Reading and Writing in Time (2011), Gallop draws sharp attention to the skewed temporalities that constitute authorial death, temporalities she specifically calls out as queer in the second half of her book. Consistent with her insights, my feeling authorially dead is perhaps less a sense that I am surplus to the requirement of being interpretatively key to my own work than a sensation of being alchemically transmuted into my own reader, enjoined to encounter my book again and sometimes differently via the smart and often provocative interpretations that return it to me, newly vibrant in the post-production feedback loop of this dossier.

The dossier itself had its origins in a roundtable discussion of Orgasmology (2013) at the 2015 Modern Languages Association conference in Vancouver, which was proposed by Robyn Wiegman, chaired by Kadji Amin, and included presentations from Gallop, Valerie Traub, and Wiegman that anticipated their dossier contributions here. Ever since the roundtable was proposed, the thought of being subject to the grain of these collective but singular critical voices was both a flattering and an anxiety-inducing prospect. In the event, however, I found that a large part of my enjoyment in being critically encountered by these three—despite the challenges and even the critiques they pointed my [End Page 186] way—depended on the different ways each engaged my work through a method or critical concern distinctively her own. Thus Orgasmology was returned to me by Gallop via her signature close readings that track some seemingly stray meaning across the fancied asides of the parenthetical comment or the bathyspheric depths of the footnote; by Traub via her insistence, most recently in Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns (2015), on sexuality as a problem of epistemology in which the opacity of sex should shape the methods by which we seek to engage it; and by Wiegman via her ongoing work, most substantially in Object Lessons (2012), on the disciplinary protocols that yield up the field imaginaries of identity-based studies and her sharp attention to the work that sex, particularly in its anti-normative registers, does as a signifying concept for queer studies.

In the expanded format of the dossier, the feeling persists of having my work resonate differently through other archives of thought, both shared and idiosyncratic. This does not feel like being misheard. Nor is it that familiar sinking feeling you can get after delivering a paper when all the questions seem designed to promote the intellectual interests of your interlocutors over your own. Rather, the contributions to this dossier offer a welcome recognition and expansion of the critical stakes of Orgasmology. While my intention not to “resolve orgasm into a critical term, the usability of which will be evidenced by its portability and scalability to other critical contexts” (Jagose 2013, xvi) remains, hearing my book in these different voices is a welcome confirmation that, even without an ambition for a field of knowledge to cohere around it, the work undertaken in Orgasmology has a recognizable critical currency in relation to other queer knowledge projects.

Some respondents recontextualize orgasm as an object in their own fields: Barbara Creed returns to film studies, pursuing the question of the inhuman in relation to the representation of orgasm in two silent films, while Barry Reay takes a historical approach, extending my discussion of a cruel chapter in mid-century orgasmic reconditioning trials to include clinical behavior modification of transgender subjects. Other respondents see orgasm as in some way analogous to a range of scholarly...