Commentary
It was sometime in the 1990s that academics fell in love with the idea of transgression. Not actual transgression, but the topic, the concept, the theory of it.
Most professors lead bourgeois lives, teaching classes, doing some research, worrying about money and housing, and promotion. They may fancy themselves daringly progressive now and then, but a bohemian life of genuine transgression wouldn’t let them continue as steady employees of an institution as hierarchical, and regulated, and conformist as higher education is.  For most of them, transgression is something to analyze and discuss, not to do.
And analyze and discuss they have, starting in the last decade of the last millennium. I just checked the Modern Language Association International Bibliography for the years 1970-79 and found that the word “transgression” appeared in the titles of books, articles, reviews, and whatnot in literary studies only 33 times. The word had no special disciplinary meaning.
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