Manufacturing Orgasm: Visuality, Aurality, and Female Sexual Pleasure in Tsai Ming-liang’s The Wayward Cloud

Abstract

In the study of both sex and the city, sound tends to be an aspect that does not receive as much attention as visuality. By examining the sound of sex in Tsai Ming-liang’s 2005 film, The Wayward Cloud, this article will argue that the aural is privileged over the visual and explore its implications for female subjectivity, sexual intimacy and gender politics. It suggests that the film challenges us to think whether it might be possible to forge what Mary Ann Doane calls ‘a political erotics of the voice’, but in a wayward manner that deploys comatose bodies that have no voice, that fragments the unity of voice and body and that privileges the representation of the sonic over the visual in a cinematic tradition that generally dictates otherwise.