A Hidden Agenda: Gender in Selected Writings by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer

Abstract

In Dialektik der Aufklärung (1944–47), Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno criticize the “bourgeois subject” as a perpetrator of the exploitation and domination of “nature.” Within the parameters of “bourgeois ideology,”“woman” functions as a representative of “nature.” Although Horkheimer and Adorno reflect critically on the utilization and misuse of “woman,” this essay explores the extent to which the concepts “masculine” and “feminine” function as implicit theoretical categories in selected writings by these authors. Indeed, a close reading of selected passages in works by Horkheimer and Adorno reveals that gendered categories in these texts carry with them a value judgment. While Horkheimer and Adorno describe the individual of late capitalism as “emasculated” and feminized (“castrated”), Adorno praises artists such as Arnold Schönberg, who manifests a potent masculinity. In fact, Adorno often writes about individuals and art works in terms which privilege “masculinity” as opposed to an emasculating “femininity.” Value judgments which employ gendered categories, then, stand in contradiction to the explicitly critical project of Dialektik der Aufklärung.