Law, Sexuality and Subjectivity: A Critical Contribution

The relationship between legal field and sexuality is a particularly challenging object of inquiry for a critical sociology of law. It has been included in a research agenda that has gained an unprecedentedforce in academic work, due to the increase of media attention, political activism pressure and legal reform projects. The lineage of feminist and queer sociolegal epistemologies, in their synchronies and contradictions, has been seen as a privileged intellectual angle to address the modes of production of sexual truth and justice, enabling the deconstruction of different expressions of patriarchal rationality both in social interactions and legal reasoning. However, much of these political or analytical perspectives are based in specific semantics of sexuality whose origins, presumptions, paradoxes and further consequences are far from being clarified. The aim of this communication is to put in evidence some of these underlying dimensions focusing “sexual orientation” as a cultural category that claims for a deeper sociological discussion not only around umbrellas like identity, discrimination, deviance, dangerousness and normality, but also on what is – and what is not – sexual in the legal uses and imagination of “sexual orientation”. Through a sample of Portuguese case law and legal controversies, this communication will try to map some points of tension within the forensic approach to sexuality, exposing some dilemmas and misunderstandings that characterize the coalition between law and psychiatry in the task of framing, meaning and governing sexuality as a source of power, constraint and subjectivity.