Abstract

Desire confounds rhetoricians and sexologists alike. In this essay, I draw on Karen Barad’s agential realism to theorize sexual desire as a “phenomenon”: a dynamic entanglement within and between bodies, including physiological processes, stimuli, awareness, and the instruments deployed to measure it. These relational elements intra-act in the context of enduring social forces that shape our experiences. Juxtaposing contemporary clinical research and an influential sexual survey, The Hite Report, as “agential cuts,” I examine how the phenomenon of desire is complexly rhetorical, as the elements comprising desire collaborate to mobilize and inhibit behavior but may also be subject to gendered intervention and constraint.