Eros Writers Against the Academy: The Case of the Sociologist Amando de Miguel

Abstract

The goal of this paper is to study how the sociologist Amando de Miguel, one of the authors who have looked into erotic culture in Spain, values the definitions of RAE’s Dictionary of Spanish (Diccionario de la lengua española). Focusing on the work El sexo de nuestros abuelos (1998), we will analyze de Miguel’s comments and judgments about the definitions of the twenty-first edition of the Dictionary. The sociologist applies here the same meta-discursive strategy which he used in La perversión del lenguaje (1994), his first “dartesque” genre work, and criticizes the “prudishness” of the academic dictionary and the discrepancy between its definitions and the linguistic use. It must be admitted, however, that this “prudishness”, pointed out with great irony in de Miguel’s book, diminished in later editions of the academic dictionary, because of a greater cultural freedom in the practices and discourses about sexuality, and a lexicographic praxis that increasingly tends to axiological neutrality.