Spring 2013 Catalog - Duke University Press

8
Annamarie Jagose is
Professor and Head of the
School of Letters, Art, and
Media at the University of
Sydney. She is the author
of Inconsequence: Lesbian
Representation and the Logic
of Sexual Sequence, Queer
Theory: An Introduction, and Lesbian Utopics, and a
coeditor of The Routledge Queer Studies Reader. Jagose
is a former editor of GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay
Studies, also published by Duke University Press.
“Orgasmology disrupts queer doxa through a renewed
emphasis on the materiality of sexual practice. Neither
gay nor straight, queer nor normative, male nor female,
orgasm shows up everywhere; its lability allows
Annamarie Jagose to roam freely across a wide range of
critical discourses, scenes, and textual objects. Sentence
by sentence, this book is extremely rewarding—funny,
finely observed, and smart in all the right places.”
—HEATHER LOVE, author of Feeling Backward: Loss
and the Politics of Queer History
“Just when they told you queer theory was dead, along
comes a book that shows, yet again, what all the excitement
was—and still is—about. Annamarie Jagose’s
patient, systematic demonstration that orgasm is the
deconstruction of sex may seem at first to be pretty
standard stuff, but the picture it discloses of the rise
of twentieth-century sexuality, and of heterosexuality in
particular, is so lucid and so surprising that you wonder
why we never could see it in such eloquent detail before.
You finish this book feeling ten times smarter than
when you started it.”—DAVID M. HALPERIN, author
of How To Be Gay
general interest
Orgasmology
annamarie jagose
For all its vaunted attention to sexuality,
queer theory has had relatively
little to say about sex, the material and
psychic practices through which erotic
gratification is sought. In Orgasmology,
Annamarie Jagose takes orgasm as her
queer scholarly object. From simultaneous
to fake orgasms, from medical
imaging to pornographic visualization,
from impersonal sexual publics
to domestic erotic intimacies, Jagose
traces the career of orgasm across
the twentieth century.
Along the way, she examines
marriage manuals of the 1920s and
1930s, designed to teach heterosexual
couples how to achieve simultaneous
orgasms; provides a queer reading of behavioral modification practices of the
1960s and 1970s aimed at transforming gay men into heterosexuals; and demonstrates
how representations of orgasm have shaped ideas about sexuality and
sexual identity.
A confident and often counterintuitive engagement with feminist and queer traditions
of critical thought, Orgasmology affords fresh perspectives on not just sex,
sexual orientation, and histories of sexuality, but also agency, ethics, intimacy,
modernity, selfhood, and sociality. As modern subjects, we presume we already
know everything there is to know about orgasm. This elegantly argued book
suggests that orgasm still has plenty to teach us.
NEXT WAVE: NEW DIRECTIONS IN WOMEN’S STUDIES
A Series Edited by Inderpal Grewal, Caren Kaplan, and Robyn Wiegman
GAY & LESBIAN STUDIES/FEMINIST THEORY/SEX
January 280 pages, 10 illustrations paper, 978–0–8223–5391–1, $23.95/£15.99 cloth, 978–0–8223–5377–5, $84.95/£64.00