Counterfeit pleasures: fake orgasm and queer agency

This essay explores the question of whether or how sex might be thought political through the figure of fake orgasm. It argues that this discredited and traditionally feminine sexual practice ought to be recognised, alongside the more celebrated fist-fucking, as one of the twentieth century's few sexual inventions. Countering the queer critical tendency to recognise minoritarian erotic practices as potentially political, this essay takes fake orgasm as its case study in order to suggest different possibilities for thinking sex and politics together. Using Foucault's call to 'bodies and pleasures' as a jumping-off point, the essay develops a post-Foucauldian queer feminist perspective in order to argue that the prevalent and persistent social practice of fake orgasm is less a problem than an inventive bodily technique that addresses itself to the regulatory apparatus and disciplinary norms of twentieth- century sex while also operating as an eloquent figure for political engagement with the conditions of the present. The essay assembles a 'quasi-history' of fake orgasm in order to argue that is not simply the simulation of orgasm but a dense complex of effects enfolding an indexically female, twentieth-century heterosexual practice that prompts us to rethink the conditions of legibility for political agency.