Androgyny’s Challenge to the “Law of the Father”: Don Juan as Epic in Reverse

Christina Dokou

For the hero of Byron’s Don Juan, androgyny—defined in a Lacanian context as the pre-sexual condition of infancy termed the Imaginary stage—is a way of resisting assimilation into the Symbolic order. Thus instead of a tale of male heroism, Byron’s poem critiques patriarchal authority and can be enlisted in the challenging of the Lacanian model of psycholinguistic development.

The Great War and Modern Gender Consciousness: The Subversive Tactics of Djuna Barnes

Margaret Bockting

Shortly after Djuna Barnes began her writing career, the Great War became a major political issue, wherein both advocates and opponents drew on (and reinforced) gender stereotypes. This essay examines the ways that Barnes exposes the brutalization and suffering caused by war, and critiques conventional conceptions of masculine heroism and feminine tenderness.

“Who’s That Girl?”: Annie Lennox, Woolf’s Orlando, and Female Camp Androgyny

George Piggford

Arguing that drag performance which is inflected by a camp sensibility disrupts gender and sexual binaries, this essay examines a tradition of female camp androgyny. Annie Lennox’s performances as a camp androgyne are used to illuminate the textual strategies of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, a work that undercuts a binaristic, Freudian model of sex.

Aliens, Androgynes, and Anthropology: Le Guin’s Critique of Representation in The Left Hand of Darkness

Mona Fayad

This essay argues that the representation of androgyny as other reveals the cultural limitations that taint so-called neutral scientific discourse. It examines the way the bodies of a physiologically androgynous species, as depicted in Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness, become implicated in socially constructed concepts of gender, power relations, and colonialism.

Experimenting with Androgyny: Malina and Ingeborg Bachmann’s Jungian Search for Utopia

Carol Anne Costabile-Heming and Vasiliki Karandrikas

The experimental narrative union of masculine and feminine in Bachmann’s novel Malina (1971) functions as her attempt to overcome patriarchal constraints. Recent theorizing about gender and critiques of Jungian psychology and feminism help to explain why Bachmann’s experiment with androgyny was unsuccessful in depicting the articulation of an integrated self.

Poise, Positioning and Possibility: A Photographic Essay

Paul Martens

Androgynous Voices in the Novels of Cristina Peri Rossi

Helena Antolin Cochrane

Lesbian novelist Cristina Peri Rossi employs a variety of strategies to express desire which transcends generic/gender and social limits. Her characters develop a knowledge of their place in the world based on a masculine/universal perspective which is informed by a feminine/androgynous sensibility. Peri Rossi’s assumption of the masculine persona is at once a performative and exploratory linguistic gesture.

Androgyny as Resistance to Authoritarianism in Two Postmodern Canadian Novels

Linda Lamont-Stewart

Focusing on Timothy Findley’s Not Wanted on the Voyage and Thomas King’s Green Grass, Running Water, this essay redefines “androgyny” to designate figures that resist conventional gender categories. These contemporary Canadian novels are read as counter-narratives which deploy androgynous figures to parody traditional texts, thus challenging their underlying authoritarian ideologies.

Élisabeth Badinter et les “différences subtiles” de l’androgynie

Guy Bouchard

According to Badinter, androgyny is the answer to the identity crisis of the male human being. This essay evaluates the relevance of this solution with regard to the nature and level of the androgynous characteristics, and with regard to the relation between the androgynous individual and society.

Atwood’s The Robber Bride: The Vampire as Intersubjective Catalyst

Phyllis Sternberg Perrakis

Drawing on the intersubjective theories of psychoanalysts Daniel Stern and Jessica Benjamin, this essay explores the paradoxical role that Zenia, Margaret Atwood’s psychological vampire, plays in The Robber Bride. Although Zenia’s seductive narratives steal away the loved ones of the three female protagonists, her function is ultimately liberating.

“Creatures of the Rainbow”: Wallace Stevens, Mark Doty, and the Poetics of Androgyny

David R. Jarraway

The influence of Wallace Stevens on modern writing is extensive, but in the case of gay American writers—both in poetry and prose—his impact is extraordinary. Focusing on the work of Mark Doty, this essay discusses the way that his debt to Stevens in both forms of writing can be located in a mutually shared “poetics of androgyny.”

Sex as Performance with All the World as Stage

Barbara Charlesworth Gelpi

Using as a focus Judith Butler’s statement that sex is “performatively enacted signification,” this review essay surveys four works that, taken as a whole, constitute a historical discussion of theater as a site for cross-dressing from the Renaissance to the present: Patrick Barbier’s The World of the Castrati, Laura Levine’s Men in Women’s Clothing, Stephen Orgel’s Impersonations, and Alan Sinfield’s The Wilde Century. Butler’s emphasis on the mimetic as transgressive of gender boundaries, while much more insightful than early feminist theory on androgyny, is found less than adequate as philosophical grounding for a full conceptualization of subjectivity.

The Ethics of Difference in an Age of Technological Gender B(l)ending

Karen Kaivola

This review essay discusses four recent books on transgenderism and transsexualism: Kate Bornstein’s Gender Outlaw, Richard Ekins and Dave King’s Blending Genders, Leslie Feinberg’s Transgender Warriors, and Bernice Hausman’s Changing Sex. Unlike traditional (and conservative) forms of androgyny, which idealize a reconciliation of patriarchal gender constructs, these studies call into question gender dichotomies and sexual dimorphisms and explore the more subversive, embodied forms of sex/gender b(l)ending made possible by technology. Responding to this recent scholarship, the review concludes by suggesting that technological gender b(l)ending calls for new ways of thinking about the ethics of difference.

Hedonism and Hegemony: Bodily Matters at a Loss

Jann Matlock

In fall 1995, a major show at the Centre Pompidou in Paris engaged, for the first time in France, a plethora of questions relating to gender and sexuality as they have been posed through the art of the 20th century. Focusing on the exhibit catalogue, this review essay argues that the theoretical framework for the project suffered from ignoring the work done by Anglo-American feminists, particularly the political ramifications of Judith Butler’s Bodies that Matter. Also reviewing Mary Louise Roberts’s Civilization Without Sexes, this essay explores the way that her emphasis upon historical specificity in her treatment of gender issues in post-WWI France serves to highlight this kind of grounding that is missing in the commentaries provided in the catalogue.