(Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture) Rolf J

BENJAMIN’S GENDER, SEX, AND EROS
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that is neither psychically nor somatically induced, but that instead is a
form of cultural metamorphosis that the industry and fashion of the commodity
society imposes on gender, sex, and love.
Benjamin scholarship might further investigate Benjamin’s insights
into the production of new sexual species in relation to research in sexology
by Hirschfeld and his followers. How do Benjamin’s “androgynous lesbian,”
“(male-to-female) transsexual genii and literati,” “fashion-induced
female transvestites,” “factory-induced (female-to-male) transsexuals,” as
well as “daemonic hermaphroditism,” and “divine androgyny,” compare
with Hirschfeld’s “sexual intermediaries” as the indices of an emerging
anthropology and coming sexual community? How might Benjamin’s
insights be combined with those of Hirschfeld and others to interrogate
what is now, as in Benjamin’s time, the newest metropolitan species and
most modish form of transsexuality, namely “metrosexuality”?
Transsexual Architecture
Benjamin raises the specter of utopian nineteenth-century architecture
that designed, but never actualized, public space for where the sexes might
meet — not to exchange sex but to change their sexual (inter)subjectivity.
While considering the androgynous nature of Baudelaire’s “modern
woman in her heroic manifestations,’” Benjamin makes a passing reference
to Charles Duveyrier’s La ville nouvelle ou le Paris des Saint-Simoniens,
and specifically to Duveyrier’s androgynous design for a temple that
was to be the showpiece of the Saint-Simonians’ “New City” (GS I.2:594;
SW 4:56). This reference not only identifies a concrete historical source of
Baudelaire’s androgynous lesbian but also alludes to the materialist faith
that inspired utopian architecture. Duveyrier and his Saint-Simonian brethren
believed that by constructing androgynous public space for the communion
of the masses they could transform a decaying Vitruvian “mancity”
into a vital and organic bisexual commonwealth. Elaborations of this design
called for the trans-incorporation of female and male structural and functional
anatomy into one gigantic building “organism,” whose galvanizing
space would induce a mass “moralization of the people.” 24 The new masses
of citoyenne and citoyen would here be viscerally organized, embodied, and
engendered in the collective space of manwomancity (or manwomanicity).
As they walked through the temple’s internal anatomy, city subjects would
undergo a psychic-social sex change from individual men and women into
an androgynous body politic. The temple’s androgyny would serve as the
prime architectural model for androgynizing the city overall. Gone would
be all residue of Rome’s patriarchal res publica that excluded women from
functioning equally in social, cultural, and political life.
Utopian architectural androgyny aimed to bring men and women
together in one collective space in the spirit of public communion and