(Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture) Rolf J

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DIANNE CHISHOLM
community-building; it did not aim to fuse, or confuse, the sexes in one
body, nor did it embody a “daemonic” mix of the sexual and the spiritual.
The “transsexualizing” that such androgynous architecture entails
is that of the public body — the body politic — not the individual female
or male body. Women are “masculinized” inasmuch as they join men
in public works and political union; men are “feminized” inasmuch as
they join women in social communion. Such a union, or communion, of
separate spheres is in keeping with Benjamin’s ethos of “esoteric love.”
Yet Benjamin raises this specter of utopian androgyny, not in celebration
of its idea, but in profane illumination of its never having been actualized.
The design remains to be deployed in contemporary architectural
engineering. He thus invites historians and futurists of urban culture
to consider architecture’s ideal and actual, utopian and pragmatic contribution
to be the transformation of sexual-social relations in modern
society. Queer cultural studies might read Benjamin’s notes on architectural
androgyny alongside his notes on sartorial androgyny — especially
those that evidence how new urban fashions transformed women’s
physical, sexual, and social mobility.
The Work of Sex in the Age of Technological Reproducibility
Feminists rightly criticize Benjamin for failing to consider the perception
and experience of commodity society from the perspective of this exemplary
human commodity. The prostitute, for Benjamin, best serves his
critical project as the destructive allegory of mass society’s self-betrayal
and its delusory romance with the commodity fetish. Yet, Benjamin does
offer feminists a way of thinking about the prostitute as an exemplary
figure of anthropological materialism through which the transformation
of industrial-age sex and sexuality is made most concretely and critically
perceptible. Benjamin’s prostitute is not just a mass victim of mass marketing.
Nor is she merely Our Lady of Commodity Seduction dressed in
the phantasmagoria of exchange value. She represents the liberation of all
women, and all sex and sexuality, from the traditional confines of marriage
— at a cost: the mobile woman can put herself on the (sex) market
or she will be seen as sexually marketable even when she literally is not.
With sexual mobility comes sexual marketability, and not only for women.
Sexual mobility and marketability is the social leveler of erotic freedom
for all classes of women and all classes of queers — cruising lesbians and
gay men, as well as male hustlers and lesbian streetwalkers. In the modern
industrial city everyone, not just the bourgeois heterosexual male, is free
to cruise the streets in search of a lover-buyer.
In failing to consider the subjectivity of cruising lesbians and gay men,
working-class male hustlers, and female and lesbian prostitutes, Benjamin
also overlooks the dangers of street violence that accompany and com-