(Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture) Rolf J

BENJAMIN’S GENDER, SEX, AND EROS
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Themes for Further Study
Although Benjamin does not outline an incipient theory of gender and
sexuality, his usefulness for future research in feminist and queer studies
should not be dismissed. Conversely, Benjamin scholarship has far from
exhausted inquiry into the significance of the prevalence of images and
motifs of gender, sex, and Eros in Benjamin’s writing, and it has yet to
consider that prevalence in the context of contemporary sexology and the
history of sexuality. How does Benjamin’s imaging of gender, sex, and
Eros subvert the panoptic discourse of sex, and with what implications
for social/sexual emancipation? Should Benjamin’s motifs of gender, sex,
and Eros be thought of as “avant-garde” in their own right and not just
as critical reflections on surrealist sexualities? If Benjamin’s images and
motifs of gender, sex, and Eros indicate a “strange” libidinal economy
and a general tendency toward illuminating “the perverse,” at the same
time as they fail to reflect any political or cultural liaison with any sexual
liberation movements of the day, then what social meaning can we give
this peculiar form of queerness? What new branch of queer studies does
Benjamin’s “perverse” suggest? These are questions that remain to be
asked with systematic research.
The future of Benjamin-inflected research in feminist and queer
studies, as well as the future of sexuality-oriented Benjamin scholarship,
might begin with the pervasively “perverse” in Benjamin’s writing. The
pervasiveness of perverse images of gender, sex, and Eros in Benjamin’s
writings warrants further research by Benjamin scholars into Benjamin’s
critical (if only negative) relation to the sexology of his day and to the
erotic (bohemian, queer) communities of Berlin and Paris on whose margins
he conducted his flâneries. Susan Buck-Morss has astutely reconstructed
the actual route of Benjamin’s dilatory flâneries to and from
the Bibliothèque Nationale. We might also consider how Benjamin’s flâneur-writing
invents and deploys a queer technique of cruising the city of
sexual modernity. Then again, Benjamin’s pervasively “perverse” imaging
of modernity’s gender, sex, and Eros offers a critical perspective through
which to reorient queer studies and its remarkably singular Foucauldian
focus. Some themes for future research in feminist studies, queer studies,
and cultural critique, as well as Benjamin studies, are suggested below:
Benjamin’s Androgyny, Hermaphroditism, and Transsexualism in
the Context of Sexology
Given Benjamin’s numerous references to Freud’s or Freudian interpretations
of sexuality, Freud’s theory of bisexuality would suggest the most
obvious frame of reference with which to understand Benjamin’s most
esoteric, most perverse (and perversely complex) images — namely, his
androgynous, hermaphroditic, and transsexual images. Given also that