Adorno’s “Sexual Taboos and Law Today” – Today

Published in 1963, Theodor W. Adorno’s “Sexual Taboos and Law Today” constituted a timely intervention in the public debate on changing sexual mores in the 1960s. Critiquing repressive bourgeois morality and progressive sexual values alike, the essay suggests that the utopian potential of intimacy is inseparable from the tension sex­u­al­ity creates for self and society. The text’s most famous line – “It is a nice bit of sexual utopia not to be yourself” – already locates the promise of sexuality in the momentary dissolution of identity. It meets with Adorno’s claim that without its anarchical and transgressive aspects sexuality becomes neutralised and inert. Yet, these aspects evoke society’s contempt: “What is specifically sexual is eo ipso forbidden,” Adorno writes.
Sixty years on, in the wake of #MeToo and heightened public concern for gender equality, trans rights, and identity politics, “Sexual Taboos and Law Today” provokes renewed scrutiny. A special issue of the Journal of Adorno Studies will open its pages to international experts in the fields of critical theory, legal theory, and psychoanalysis to discuss the force and limitations of “Sexual Taboos and Law Today” in a contemporary context.