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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 [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

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 Halperin, author of How To Be Gay

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

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

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Annamarie Jagose is the author of Inconsequence: Lesbian Representation and the Logic of Sexual Sequence and of Queer Theory: An Introduction.

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