The Shemale As A Figure in Art

In the hermaphrodite, or shemale, the fusion of the masculine and the feminine enables the feminized male to attain independence from women, as he no longer needs, as it were, to barter his wealth and power for her beauty but, instead, has feminine beauty within his own body: "A good example is Donatelo's David," Beyst says. "The beautiful young boy enjoys the beauty of his own body that makes him independent from the unattainable woman. The entwining of the bodies is replaced with the closed circle of the eye admiring the beauty of its own body," resulting in " the complete visualization of genitality." The shemale has a counterpart in the so-called phallic woman: "The counterpart of such 'feminine' self-sufficient retirement in itself is the aggressive triumph of the 'phallic woman': desirability and desire in one and the same body. Here, the emphasis is on the desiring penis," and in the case both of the shemale and the "phallic woman," "the eye enjoys its own body, or, to be more precise, the part of its body that belongs to the other sex." In art, the creation of the shemale or the phallic woman results in the same sort of "merger of desiring penis and desired body" that is effected in the sex-reassignment surgery that transsexuals undergo: "The visualization is completed when the identification of desiring body and desired body eventually leads to the replacement of the desiring organ itself. That is the case when the male wants to be transformed in the desired female, and the desired female in the desired male. An illustration is the self-portrait of Schiele: a gory seam runs over the scrotum, no member is to be seen, the abdomen is transformed into a womb, the upper part of the body is adorned with female breast, the arms hold their own head and the legs are cut off, not otherwise than the penis. Only the angularity of the skinny body are the last testimonies to the dissolved masculinity."