Gendered Bodily Flux and Queer Catharsis in the Work of Bruno Schulz

Abstract

This article analyzes themes of shapeshifting and gendered supplication by Polish Jewish writer and artist Bruno Schulz (1892–1942) in relation to his biographical and cultural positioning in the decades preceding World War II. It does so through historically contextualized close readings of Schulz’s drawings and writings from 1919 through the 1930s, which render his embodied alienation and complex relationships to gender, Jewish cultural identity, and the pursuit of spiritual transcendence. Drawing on existing works in Jewish cultural studies and gender theory, Schulz’s shape-shifting and supplicated male characters are shown to speak, rather than to an alleged Jewish sexual perversity, to a history of Jewish affective alienation and sexual displacement in modern Europe. These themes in Schulz’s work are also considered as forms of aesthetic opposition to modernizing social ideologies and to the sexual antisemitism bolstered by them.