Faking It, Finishing, and Ambivalence

This essay analyzes the transcription of critical focus group conversation among women to understand failure within their sexual lives. Against the backdrop of normative sexual scripts, women discuss faked orgasms and lackluster sex. Practicing a reparative reading method, we explore the relationship between failure, ambivalence, and sex in conversation. We conclude that the focus on women’s lived experiences highlights the reparative possibilities of ambivalent discussions surrounding failure; failure and ambivalence in sex are neither endgame nor roadblock. Instead, failure and ambivalence are constitutive of the gray areas of sexual communication, which contain within them moments of agency, pleasure, and power.