(Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture) Rolf J

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DIANNE CHISHOLM
Benjamin was thinking in these images at a time when Magnus Hirschfeld
was conducting and publicizing his radically contentious researches on
“sexual intermediaries,” it is surprising that no one has yet thought to
read these images in the context of sexology.
We might first, then, consider how Benjamin’s hermaphroditism differs
from Freud’s bisexuality. Freud argues that the nascent human psyche
is bisexual and that it is subsequently structured to conform to normative
gender through a multi-phasic Oedipal process of incorporation, identification,
projection, castration, and repression. Accordingly, this process
rarely forms a psyche that is perfectly feminine or masculine. Bisexuality
retains its primacy throughout the process of psychosexual maturation and
it persistently finds expression in mature sexuality, chiefly in homosexuality.
Female homosexuality, for Freud, is always associated with masculinity
in women (feminine female homosexuals fall outside Freud’s radar,
while Freud regards effeminate male homosexuals with indifference).
Benjamin, like Freud, confuses sexuality and gender; he, for instance,
discusses lesbianism and the masculinization of female factory workers
in the same breath. But Benjamin’s “lesbian” comprises a constellation
of motifs drawn from nineteenth-century avant-garde culture (including
George Sand’s transvestism and Proust’s Albertine, as well as those mentioned
above). Less an en-gendering of the individual psyche, Benjamin’s
“lesbian” is more a multi-faceted emblazon of perverse femininity in the
wake of women’s entry into the industrial work force and their emancipation
from motherhood, as well as their re-fashioning in apparel of greater
physical and social mobility.
Yet even a negative comparison between Benjamin’s androgyny,
hermaphroditism, and transsexualism and Hirschfeld’s sexual intermediaries
could illuminate Benjamin’s critical and perverse contradictions of
the thinking of contemporary sexual science. A leading advocate for the
recognition of sexual diversity and minority sexuality — especially homosexuality
— Hirschfeld was targeted by German Nazis, who thought
his ideas extremely dangerous. Hirschfeld’s research radically departed
from the received thinking of his predecessor, Richard von Krafft-Ebing,
whose Psychopathia Sexualis (1877) categorized and pathologized all
forms of sexuality that did not aim at procreative heterosexuality, above
all “metamorphosis sexualis paranoiaca” (transsexuality). Hirschfeld’s
book Transvestites (1910) differentiates transvestitism from homosexuality
and fetishism, and transsexuality (the embodiment of the psychic urge
of a person of one sex to “metamorphose” into the other sex) from hermaphroditism
(the possession of sexual anatomy of both sexes), though it
categorizes transsexuality as a form of psychosis. Decades later Harry Benjamin
would, in The Transsexual Phenomenon (1966), refine the empirical
distinction between “somatopsychic transsexualists” from “psychogenic
transvestites.” 23 By contrast, Walter Benjamin images a “transsexuality”