Cross-Dressing for Platonic Love: Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s The Love of Plato

Abstract

Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s 1870 novella The Love of Plato (Die Liebe des Plato), with its themes of female cross-dressing and male platonic homosexual desire, would seem predestined to be a pivotal text at the intersection of feminist and queer theory, but surprisingly, it has escaped theoretical attention and scrutiny.¹ The particular focus of the reception of Sacher-Masoch’s oeuvre on his novel Venus in Furs has eclipsed his other literary works. More importantly, however, indebtedness of The Love of Plato to a hegemonic nineteenth-century understanding of gender makes it an uneasy appropriation for feminist theory, and the marginalization and highly-coded nature of desexualized male homosexuality does not lend itself to an easy embrace by Queer Studies.