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Orgasmology / Love and money:

queers, class, and cultural production /
Queer youth suicide, culture and
identity: unliveable lives?
a
Damon R. Young
a
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA
Published online: 20 May 2015.

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To cite this article: Damon R. Young (2015): Orgasmology / Love and money: queers, class, and
cultural production / Queer youth suicide, culture and identity: unliveable lives?, Continuum:
Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, DOI: 10.1080/10304312.2015.1040730

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 Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, 2015
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10304312.2015.1040730

REVIEW ESSAY

Orgasmology, by Annamarie Jagose, Durham, Duke University Press, 2013, xxii þ 252
pp., US$23.95 (paperback), ISBN 978-0-8223-5391-1

Love and money: queers, class, and cultural production, by Lisa Henderson, New
York, NYU Press, 2013, xii þ 201 pp., US$23.00 (paperback), ISBN 978-0-8147-9058-8

Queer youth suicide, culture and identity: unliveable lives?, by Rob Cover, Farnham,
Ashgate, 2012, xi þ 172 pp., £60.00 (hardback), ISBN 978-1-4094-4447-3
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It is by now a critical commonplace that sexuality is central to the production of modern

subjectivity. But as Annamarie Jagose reminds us in Orgasmology, sexuality has also
functioned throughout the twentieth century as ‘the ambivalent focus of quotidian and
utopian projects of sociopolitical transformation’ (2013, 177). Among those projects, we
can include the critical practice of queer theory itself. Emerging in the US academy in the
early 1990s, queer theory has been shaped from the outset by a certain tension between
critique and utopianism, arguably reflecting its dual genealogy in French post-
structuralism on the one hand and 1960s and 1970s movement politics on the other.
That tension underpins some of the major debates in queer theory today, and it can be felt
in the different emphases of these three recent additions to the field. Jagose’s book
exemplifies the critical approach: refusing any utopian or ‘reparative’ agenda, it teases out
the contradictions in cultural narratives about sexuality through the prism of one of their
privileged figures, the orgasm. Henderson’s Love and Money, by contrast, explores the
intersections of sexual and class identities in order to advance a program of what the
author calls ‘plausible optimism’, a phrase which indicates the book’s commitment to
positive affect as a political resource. Cover’s study of gay male youth suicide in the USA
translates both approaches to a more pragmatic register: with a sense of urgency in the face
of a pressing social problem, it frames its deconstructive analyses of discourses around
sexuality and youth in terms of their potential policy implications.
It might seem that there is nothing to say about the orgasm, which speaks (as it were)
for itself, or rather which might seem a pure instance of non-discursive, physiological self-
evidence. But by delving into archives rarely attended to by queer theorists – including
early twentieth-century marriage manuals, clinical notes of 1960s behaviourist
psychologists, and medical graphology – Jagose shows how orgasm has functioned as a
central figure in the elaboration of modern paradigms of sexual knowledge. Orgasm,
writes Jagose, condenses the paradoxes and contradictions that shape the ‘epistemological
contours of modern sexuality’ (34). It is at once ‘biological and cultural, representable and
unrepresentable, . . . personal and impersonal, . . . innate and acquired; voluntary and
involuntary; mechanistic and psychological’ (34), and the list continues.
Among these structuring contradictions one stands out as particularly significant.
On the one hand, sexuality (as Foucault taught us) is taken to represent the ‘truth’ of the
subject, what is most deeply personal and in need of interpretation. On the other hand,
modern urbanization leads to ever-increased ‘opportunities for impersonal transactions or
 2 Review Essay

encounters’ (Jagose, 89), and occasions a new, de-personalized imaginary of sexuality.

Foucault, according to Jagose, associated genital orgasm with the personalizing model of
sexuality which functions, for him, as an apparatus of discipline and control. His much-
commented notion of ‘bodies and pleasures’ evoked an alternative ‘nondisciplinary
eroticism’ (Jagose, 187) that would not turn around the gravitational centre of the genital
orgasm; it would involve ‘chance encounters and unplanned pleasures’ (187) that were
neither personal nor necessarily orgasmic. But orgasm, as Jagose shows, is just as often
figured as de-personalizing, as merely physiological, self-evident, a reflex response
attesting to the body’s pleasure outside of any hermeneutics of desire. It appears this way,
for example, in the graphological representations of 1960s sexologists Masters and
Johnson, authors of Human Sexual Response, the epochal text that provided orgasm with a
quantitative language. Across diverse archives, Jagose distils the contradictory meanings
and investments which place orgasm at the centre of twentieth-century ways of thinking
sex.
The framing tension of personalizing vs. depersonalizing discourses of sexuality –
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what Jagose refers to as the ‘double bind of modern sex’ (89) – is first developed in a
chapter on John Cameron Mitchell’s 2004 film Shortbus, titled ‘Straight Woman/Gay
Man’. Inadvertently reprising the narrative premise of Deep Throat (1972), the film deals
with its protagonist Sofia’s quest to have an orgasm; in both films, the narrative climax
coincides with the climax of the heroine. But where Deep Throat used orgasm to stage a
grotesque fantasy of heterosexuality, Shortbus situates its narrative of female sexual
education in a queer time and place – New York City, post-September 11, reimagined as a
queer fantasia. There, in the titular Shortbus club, Sofia’s sexual fate becomes intertwined
with the intimate explorations of a group of (mostly) gay men. Jagose argues that there is
nothing arbitrary about this pairing. Through a fascinating reading of the work of Anthony
Giddens and Henning Bech, she shows how straight women and gay men have been
differently invoked by social theory as avatars of the modern (‘democratic’) sexual subject
(92). While Giddens associates women with intensified personal bonds in the twentieth
century, for Bech gay men’s ‘impersonal’ sexual practices such as cruising are corollaries
of the ‘omnipresent, diffuse sexualization of the city’ (in Jagose, 91). The film brings these
two figures of sexual modernity together around a narrative of orgasm, which for its part
functions ‘simultaneously in personal and impersonal registers’, representing ‘both the
successful attainment of individualized narrative closure and an expression of a drive
unmoored from the psychological confines of personhood’ (104). The film and the figures
within it thus crystallize the ‘double bind of modern sex’.
The discussion of Shortbus demonstrates Jagose’s talent for imaginative close
readings, which she folds into a broad and synthetic account of large swathes of cultural
material. In another chapter, she shows how the discourse on simultaneous orgasm that
developed in early twentieth-century marriage manuals shaped the emergence of a
heteronormativity dissociated from reproduction and installed as a social ideal on its own
terms. Here the figure of orgasm works to preserve the ideology of heterosexual
complementarity even while accommodating emergent discourses of women’s autonomy.
Later in the book, Jagose turns to the figure of the fake orgasm, testing out its political
value for a more speculative mode of queer theory. Queer theory’s surprisingly limited
discussions of actual sex, Jagose claims, have tended to focus on ‘transgressive’ (and
presumptively male –male) acts. By contrast, the figure of fake orgasm shifts the emphasis
to female sexuality while resisting any triumphalist investment in sex as transgressive – or
even enjoyable. This figure thus suggests an alternate sexual politics which ‘troubles the
presumed truth or authenticity of sex itself’ (206), certainly an interesting proposition.
 Review Essay 3

However, the steps that would secure the unlikely connection between fake orgasm and a
reconceived notion of political agency are not sufficiently expounded, and here a certain
pedagogical instinct proves a mixed blessing: Jagose is such a great explainer of the work
of others that her own arguments sometimes cede space to that exemplary practice of
explanation. This pedagogical talent was put to brilliant use in Jagose’s earlier and still
canonical Queer Theory: An Introduction (1996). In Orgasmology, one sometimes wishes
the vast erudition on display would allow more room for the further development of the
author’s own fascinating and often counterintuitive arguments.
Jagose’s interest in a figure such as the fake orgasm demonstrates her fundamentally
anti-utopian sensibility. Critically alert to the historical nuances of the way sex becomes a
site of utopian investment, Jagose restricts herself to showing the limits and contradictions
that structure cultural and intellectual paradigms. For this reason, Orgasmology also bucks
current trends in keeping a sceptical distance from what many authors in queer studies
have come to refer to, following Eve Sedgwick (2003), as a ‘reparative’ mode of criticism,
one that offers the fantasy of ‘repair’ as a dubious substitute for ‘paranoid’ critique.
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The seductions of the ‘reparative’, as well as some of its shortcomings, are on view in
Lisa Henderson’s Love and Money: Queers, Class, and Cultural Production. Although
class is routinely included in the roll call of intersectional categories queer studies purports
to address – gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, class, ability – it is the most likely, in the
USA at least, to be nominally invoked rather than substantively taken up. Love and Money
is a welcome addition to the short roster of works that brings an authentic class analysis to
the study of queer culture. I say ‘queer culture’ advisedly because Henderson approaches
both queerness and class as a set of cultural practices, tastes and sensibilities. As such they
become commensurable (though not identical) categories of identity, equally worthy of an
identity politics, or what Henderson calls a politics of ‘recognition’. The strength of this
approach is that it takes culture, and popular culture, seriously as sites at which class
relations (as well as sexual identities) find their substantive form of expression. Henderson
reminds us that there is no cultural world ‘structured apart from the density of class
relations’ (2013, 23), and presumably in a class society, no sexuality that is independent of
class fantasy. But the decision to treat class in terms of affect and cultural identity rather
than in terms of impersonal, material relations of production also raises some problems.
Like Jagose, Henderson is a great close reader. Her analyses of the films Boys Don’t
Cry (Kimberly Peirce 1999), You and Me and Everything We Know (Miranda July, 2005),
Brokeback Mountain (Ang Lee 2004) and By Hook or By Crook (Silas Howard and Harry
Dodge 2001), as well as a range of contemporary North American television shows,
illuminate the ways that class fantasies and prejudices overdetermine the representation of
sexual identities (and vice versa). More ‘materialist’ than many of her fellow practitioners
of queer cultural studies, Henderson never loses sight of the on-the-ground questions of
‘how queer cultural producers and citizens actually live and work’ (21), and how texts are
read and received. As a storyteller and ethnographer, Henderson is attuned to the messy
and complex negotiations of everyday life and its ways of making do. This attunement
corresponds to an aversion for polemical or prescriptive politics, though Henderson does
not hide her own (gentle leftist) political views. The book veers at some of its most
engaging moments in the direction of personal memoir, and the voice that emerges is wry
and wise.
So long as queerness and class are taken to be forms of identity, the relation between
them can be presented as analogical. Both queerness and working class identity, for
example, might have some privileged relation to shame. In a chapter on novelist Dorothy
Allison, Henderson cites an audience member at a reading who tells her that in the USA,
 4 Review Essay

‘class isn’t absent, just secret’ (83). This description recalls the operations of the closet and
its accompanying forms of affect. Indeed, in some situations it is class difference that might
inspire the more ardent efforts at ‘passing’. Henderson writes that in the upper middle-class
world of the academy, for instance, lesbianism can be avowed much more easily than
working class origins. In the USA, the critical and cultural silence about class (the myth that
there is ‘no class’, even as queerness is increasingly expressed, thematized and celebrated)
serves to entrench cultural and social hierarchies precisely by disavowing them.
And yet the concept of ‘recognition’ that Henderson seeks to extend to class also points
to the limits of the analogy. Queer politics does not aim to abolish queer difference: on the
contrary, it affirms its value. Class struggle, however, hardly seeks to ‘affirm’ or
‘recognize’ class difference, but rather, as Nancy Fraser has put it, to ‘abolish . . . the class
structure as such’, to ‘put the proletariat out of business as a group’ (Fraser 1997, 17 –18).
Queer politics challenges norms, whereas class struggle concerns itself not with norms but
with relations of production. Now in ‘Merely Cultural’, an essay Henderson cites, Judith
Butler famously argued in response to Fraser that the distinction between cultural norms
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and relations of production cannot be coherently maintained, since political economy is

bound up, for example, in a kinship system historically organized around heterosexual
reproduction and exchange. For Butler, the queer critique of kinship and heterosexuality
aims not just at ‘recognition’ but at a ‘fundamental shift in the conceptualizing and
institutionalizing of [material] social relations’ (Butler 1997, 44).
The much-touted rise of ‘homonormativity’ – the recently acquired ability of liberal
capitalism to seamlessly integrate some forms of queerness without itself transforming –
suggests that an updated materialist analysis of the way sexuality interfaces with the
capitalist class system is urgently required. Butler’s point was to question the distinction
between culture and economic relations of production. But rather than pursue the radical
dimensions of this challenge or consider it in relation to our current moment, Henderson
seems to accept the distinction, extending the analysis of ‘recognition’ in a way that makes
both class and sexuality ‘merely cultural’. One result is that the relation between the two
terms – both now on the side of ‘recognition’ – becomes affirmative rather than critical,
an affirmation that generates the adjectival hybrid: ‘queer class’. Beginning with a ‘queer/
class encounter’ (10), the dividing line that separates those terms (and holds a space for the
tension between them) is soon abandoned, rendering ‘queer class identification’ (18);
‘queer-class possibility’ (18); ‘queer class longing’ (41); ‘queer class recognition’ (59);
and finally ‘queer class living’ (134), issuing in or from ‘queer class solidarity’ (165). The
conjoining of ‘queer’ and ‘class’ in each of these cases, magically resolving their
incommensurability, is authorized through an appeal to affect.
This move may be ‘reparative’ but it raises a certain problem of critical perspective.
If upper class ‘solidarity’ with the working classes can take the form of recognizing and
appreciating working class tastes and cultures (queer or otherwise), it can, alas, all too
easily limit itself to that. Conversely, what kind of solidarity should the working classes
(queer or otherwise) experience with the upper classes whose continued privilege depends
on their continuing exploitation? (In On Sexuality and Power, Alan Sinfield [2004]
describes a certain queer eroticism that is built into the class system, but I doubt this
amounts to a ‘solidarity’ worth sentimentalizing for its political effectivity.) For all the
seductiveness of the terms ‘friendship’, ‘love’, and ‘plausible optimism’ (129 and passim),
the misgiving remains that these are affective appeasements in a world in which, as
Henderson points out, the distribution of wealth has never been more unequal.
Arguably such a world calls more for a politics of antagonism, conflict, bad affect, and
indeed the much-maligned ‘paranoid’ critique, than it does for a practice of ‘reparative
 Review Essay 5

reading’, which Henderson tells us she adopted as her preferred method after encountering
Sedgwick’s famous essay on the topic during the writing of Love and Money. Henderson
cites Lauren Berlant to support her argument that feelings and political possibility are
interconnected. I wish she had taken better account of Berlant’s analysis of how optimism
is often cruel and how toxic attachments are experienced as desirable – in other words, of
affect’s duplicitous or ideological character (Berlant 2011). But not all of Henderson’s
terms are strictly affirmative: the critical term ‘relay’, developed in the course of an
ethnographic account of the production of the queer short film Desert Motel (Liza Johnson
2005), challenges entrenched oppositions between ‘commercial’ and ‘subversive’, ‘good’
and ‘bad’ art, ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ representations. Ironically, it turns out to be at its
more deconstructive and critical (some might say ‘paranoid’) moments that the book, in
my view, is most successful.
A certain reparative goal also impels Rob Cover’s Queer Youth Suicide, Culture and
Identity: Unliveable Lives?, but this time a more concrete one. The book responds to the
highly-publicized spate of suicides by young gay men in the United States in late 2010.
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How, the author asks, are we to understand the ‘continued high rate of queer youth suicide’
(2012, 44) even at a time of increasingly prevalent and positive media representations of
queer sexualities? The book concludes with the heartbreaking case of Jamey Rodemeyer, a
14 year-old boy in Buffalo, New York who committed suicide in September 2011, as
Cover was finishing the book. Rodemeyer was out and an active participant in queer youth
groups and anti-bullying online forums. He had uploaded a video narrating his triumph
over adversity to the It Gets Better website, an initiative created by Dan Savage in
response to the suicides the previous year. It Gets Better and Cover’s book are thus
alternate kinds of responses to the same phenomenon. However, the tragic case of
Rodemeyer suggests that the message of It Gets Better – ‘tough it out’ and things will
improve – may advance a particular genre of self-narration (the gay triumph narrative)
more than an actual solution.
The first half of the book analyzes assumptions about queer youth ‘suicidality’ that
prevail in a range of cultural sites, including films and online spaces, as well as in academic
studies. Cover reminds us that the reasons for any suicide are necessarily unknowable, and
may be complexly related to a variety of factors among which sexuality may not play a
directly causal role. Most importantly, he seeks to challenge the framework that presents
queer young people as ‘fated towards suicidality as a direct result of [their] sexual non-
normativity’ (22). This dominant framework produces a queer subjectivity ‘knowable only
through victimhood’ (71), and makes the risk of suicide seem ‘internal to the subject’ while
the resilience that mitigates that risk is ‘external and fostered socially’ (3).
In the second half of the book, Cover seeks to offer an alternative framework derived
from queer theory’s more complex account of the constitution of sexual subjectivity.
Suicide might feel like the only possibility when ‘the processes of normative sexual
becoming have made life unbearable’ (144). This is a subtle shift away from the
framework that takes vulnerability to be a particular quality of queerness, and that sees
risk-inducing shame as the product of specific instances of homophobic bullying. Instead,
Cover focuses on the force of norms that condition the treacherous process of becoming a
‘sexual subject’ and thus becoming socially recognizable in general. Even in contexts
where queerness is culturally ‘tolerated’ or even celebrated, even where gays and lesbians
are accorded rights that protect those identities, the process of sexual subjectivation may
offer no positions that feel ‘liveable’ for some young people. It is thus not ‘being queer’
that puts young people at risk of suicide, but the sometimes unbearable weight of norms in
relation to which we are required to take a position.
 6 Review Essay

One felicitous aspect of this analysis is that it allows Cover to show how it is not only
heteronormativity that operates to discipline the process of becoming a sexual subject. The
final chapter on the much-maligned homonormativity challenges the idea of ‘queer
community and queer social life as [inherently] a “saving refuge”’ (118), since the ways in
which gay identity is culturally affirmed exert their own normative force. The It Gets
Better campaign began with a video of Savage and his husband narrating their trajectory
from being bullied at school to becoming a wealthy, successful and happily married
couple. Cover rightly points out that the ‘hope’ they propose as a solution to despair
‘centres on contemporary neoliberal representations of what accounts for achievement
(career, domestic partnership, living in an expensive city)’ (65). Moreover, the site’s
emphasis on toughing it out and developing resilience ‘individualises the problem of queer
youth suicide’, mobilizing the (equally neoliberal) rhetoric of individual responsibility,
and making survival a problem of individual fortitude rather than calling for ‘cultural
change or intervention in the norms of school institutional culture’ (72).
Cover notes towards the end of the book that ‘the gains made by homonormative and
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neoliberal assimilationist strategies have a differential impact’ (136), which means there is
no univocal category of ‘queerness’ that suddenly becomes liveable. This is a point whose
implications, however, he may not have pursued far enough. In the USA, his site of analysis
race and class inexorably condition the production and regulation of sexual identities. And
gender norms may be much more violently policed than sexual orientation per se. A recent
report by the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention shows that transmen and
transwomen, especially of colour and especially low income, are far more often victims of
suicide (and also of violent crimes) than gay men. This is not simply a matter of statistics.
In the book’s conclusion, Cover writes that an ‘ethical perspective’ forces us to ask ‘if the
current social perception of normativity considers queer youth lives as a loss’ and thus
considers them ‘grievable’ (140). The massive media and cultural response to the spate of
suicides by young gay white men would seem to suggest that certain kinds of loss are indeed
dramatically ‘grievable’. The vast archive of video responses collected on the It Gets Better
site in the wake of Tyler Clementi’s suicide in 2010 attests to the magnitude of that grief.
In a series of responses to the It Gets Better campaign published in Social Text’s online
platform the same year, Jack Halberstam (2010) pointed out that ‘we are actually talking
about violent relations between boys in the context of highly competitive masculinities
and far less often are we talking about girls’. The forms of violence that afflict the latter
may be less dramatically performative. More broadly, Jasbir Puar (2012) sought to call
attention to the forms of subtle (and not subtle) racialized, gendered and economic
violence that produce conditions in which early death is not considered ‘exceptional’ but
rather business as usual. And Tavia Nyong’o (2010), citing Lee Edelman’s analysis of the
sanctified status of the Child in contemporary Western culture, wrote: ‘It’s not that there
aren’t vulnerable young people, but there are vulnerable people of all ages.’ None of these
writers sought to dismiss the problem of queer youth suicide. But the ‘biopolitical’ regime
of ‘neoliberalism’ that Cover refers to throughout his book is one that traffics in forms of
death-dealing that can be far less dramatic, far less exceptional, and thus far less likely to
provoke a public display of grief than the suicide of a young man for whom things, as Puar
puts it, ‘are indeed supposed to be better’ (2012, 151). What Berlant calls ‘slow death’ may
name the vast but invisible socio-economic space of truly ‘ungrievable’ violence. Cover’s
book would have benefited from applying the supple and subtle intelligence of its analysis
to the challenge these other queer theorists pose to its frame.
 Review Essay 7

References
Berlant, L. 2011. Cruel Optimism. Durham: Duke University Press.
Butler, J. 1997. “Merely Cultural.” Social Text 52/53: 265– 277. doi:10.2307/466744.
Fraser, N. 1997. Justice, Interruptus. New York: Routledge.
Halberstam, J. 2010. “It Gets Worse . . . .” Social Text – Periscope, November 10. http://
socialtextjournal.org/periscope_article/it_gets_worse/.
Nyong’o, T. 2010. “School Daze.” Bully Bloggers, September 30. https://bullybloggers.wordpress.
com/2010/09/30/school-daze/.
Puar, J. 2012. “Coda: The Cost of Getting Better: Suicide, Sensation, Switchpoints.” GLQ 18 (1):
149– 158. doi:10.1215/10642684-1422179.
Sedgwick, E. 2003. Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Durham: Duke University
Press.
Sinfield, A. 2004. On Sexuality and Power. New York: Columbia University Press.

Damon R. Young
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA
Email: damonry@umich.edu
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q 2015, Damon R. Young

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10304312.2015.1040730