Listening to orgasm: hearing pleasure sounds in the normative noise

Abstract

This essay queries the limits and possibilities of hearing women’s sexual pleasure amidst the noise of the orgasmic imperative. I underpin this query with the assumption that listening (a complex form of translation) is the communicative practice through which those limits and possibilities emerge. I mobilize the concept of “rhetorical listening” (Ratcliffe 2005), to ask where rhetorical listening can help us hear and feel what the eye cannot see. Understanding public orgasm rhetoric as a kind of “sound argument” (Eckstein 2017) compels us to understand how sound makes public discourses of pleasure possible. I posit that “hearing what cannot be seen,” amidst pernicious cultural norms that impress an “orgasmic imperative” upon women, allows women to access the structures of feeling so desperately missing in our collective knowledge of women’s orgasm. To animate this claim, I consider several public orgasm fragments alongside the book collection Orgasm: Photographs and Interviews. Because these fragments cross-contaminate the visual with the aural/written, I ask how textured narratives such as these instruct us how to listen for the multiple avenues of pleasure-difference, which constitute the public rhetoric of women’s orgasm. The paper concludes practices of rhetorical listening prime publics for more shareable, collective, and accessible narratives of women’s pleasure.