Introduction: 2021 Symonds Prize

Through the generosity of the Alexandra and Martin Symonds Foundation, each year Studies in Gender and Sexuality (SGS) recognizes an outstanding essay that speaks to the intersections of psychoanalysis and cultural theories of gender and sexuality. The editors are delighted to award the 2021 Symonds Prize to KJ Cerankowski, for his article “The ‘End’ of Orgasm: The Erotics of Durational Pleasures.” Cerankowski is an assistant professor of comparative American studies and gender, sexuality, and feminist studies at Oberlin College and author of the forthcoming book Suture: Trauma and Trans Becoming.

SGS seeks to illuminate and disrupt the colonizing ideological operations that press in upon sexuality and gender and close down space for inventive play and discovery of new dimensions of experience and identity. Here, KJ Cerankowski argues that settler colonialism and capitalism, in their devotion to progress narratives, linear time, productivity, and culmination, conspire to foreclose the vast territories of pleasurable practice available in the asexual realm in favor of elevating the orgasm as the apex of normative pleasure. The construction of the normative sexual subject (reinforced by Freud and often echoed in modern psychoanalytic thought) who is imagined as instinctually driven to couple, orgasm, and reproduce as the ultimate expression of healthy humanhood precludes access to and exploration of our own “sovereign erotic temporality” (XX), says Cerankowski. And what goes unrecognized and unexplored? Asexual and nonsexual pleasures such as “eargasms,” “emotional boners,” “snowgasms,” “haunting joy,” “spiraling pleasure,” “pleasure with no end,” “blips of pleasure—temporalities and intensities of pleasure denigrated by or invisible to the state and to logics of settler colonialism that still work upon us. This prize-winning article ensures that we attend to this bounty of nonhierarchical, queer, asexual pleasure registers that open up when the orgasm is decentered.

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