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In France Anderson and Heap- what we would now call the heterosexual.
together with Heap's ward Fritz Peters, Other ancient writers use the term to refer
who later became a homosexual novel- to an anatomical intermediate between
ist-became adherents of the mystic the two genders, synonymous with her-
GeorgeIvanovich Gurdjieff, who was then maphroditos. From this practice stems
at the height of his influence. Anderson the modern conflation of the meaning of
spent most of her later years in semi- the two terms, which is unlikely to disap-
seclusion in London, where she wrote her pear.
memoirs, which are an important source Basic Concepts. Modern lan-
for the literary history of the period. guages use "androgynous" in a variety of
senses. First, identifying it with the her-
BIBLIOGRAPHY.Margaret Anderson, maphrodite category, it may denote a
7'he Piezy Pountains, New York:
Hermitage House, 1930; idem, My somatic intermediate. In fact, the pure
Thirty Years' War, New York: Covici type with fully developed genitals of both
Friede, 1930; idem, The Strange sexes is clinically so rare as to be virtually
Necessity, New York: Horizon, 1970; nonexistent in the human species. The
Hugh Ford, Pour Lives in Paris. San individuals known as [pseudo-)hermaph-
Francisco: North Point Press, 1987, pp.
227-86. rodites generally haveincompletely formed
Evelyn Gettone genitals of one of their two sexes or both.
That is to say, an individual may have a
fully formedvaginatogetherwithastunted,
ANDROGYNY unfunctioning penis, or a well developed
An androgynous individual is one penis with a shallow, nonuterine vagina.
who has the characteristics of both sexes. Of course, in the plant and animal king-
Ideally, this quality should be distinguished doms there are many fully hermaphroditic
from hermaphroditism in the strict sense, species that are androgynous in this sense.
whereby the fusion of male and female is Secondly, nineteenth-century writers ex-
anatomically expressed through the pres- tended the physiological concept to apply
ence, or partial presence, of both sets of to those whose genitals are clearly of one
genital organs. There is a tendency to sex but whose psychic orientation is expe-
consider androgyny primarily psychic and rienced as primarily of the other: Karl
constitutional, while hermaphroditism is Heinrich Ulrichs' "female soul trapped in
anatomical. In this perspective most [psy- a male body." Since Ulrichs and others
chic)androgynes are not strictly hermaph- were primarily interested in same-sex
rodites in that anatomically they are no behavior, the term often carries the conno-
different from other men andwomen; some tation of "homosexual," even though such
hermaphrodites may not be androgynous, usage begs severalquestions. Thirdly, with
that is to say, despite their surplus organ reference to male human beings "androgy-
endowment, they behave in an essentially nous" implies effeminacy. Logically, it
masculine or feminine way. should then mean "viraginous, mas-
The term androgyne stems from culinized" when applied to women, but
the Greek androgynos, "man-woman." this parallel is rarely drawn. Thus there is
The famous myth recounted in Plato's anunanalyzed tendency to regard androgy-
Symposium presents three primordial nization as essentially a process of soften-
double beings: the man-man, the woman- ing or mitigating maleness. Stereotypi-
woman, and the man-woman. The first cally, the androgyne is a half-man or in-
two are the archetypes of the male homo- complete male.
sexual and lesbian respectively; the third, In addition to these relatively
the androgynos, is-paradoxically from specific usages there is a kind of semantic
the modem point of view-the source of halo effect, whereby androgyny is taken to
ANDROGYNY 9
As the initial enthusiasm cooled, gloss over the fact that i t was pre-
however, it was perceived that, applied to dominantly pederastic (though not pedo-
present day society, the androgynousideal phile in the narrow sense of attraction to
might lead to a disregard of the inherent prepubertal boys).
strengths of male and female, whether In the early years of the present
these be culturally or biologically deter- century, the great German sexologist
mined. Thus some feminist thinkers to- Magnus Hirschfeld offered a three-fold
day emphasize nurturing and cooperative classification of homosexuals: (1) ephe-
behavior as distinctive and desirable fe- bophiles, who prefer partners from pu-
male traits. Despite some exaggerations, berty to the early twenties (in current
recent discussions have had the merit of usage, from about 17 to about 20); (2)
helping bring into question earlier popular androphiles, who love men from that age
negativedismissals of androgyny, promot- into the fifties; and (3)gerontophiles, who
ing a more supple concept of the relation seek out old men.
between sex roles and gender. Contemplating this scheme from
the standpoint of an individual of, say,
BIBL1OGRAPHY. Sehnsucht thirty years of age, it is evident that the
nach Vollkommenheit, Berlin: Reimer,
1986; Sandra L. Bem, "The Measure- first and third categories of sex object
ment of Psychological Androgyny," constitute differentiation, the second rela-
Iournal of Counseling and Clinical tive similarity.
Psychology, 42 (1974),155-67; Mircea The shift to dominance of andro-
Eliade, Mephistopheles and the philia, in which the two partners are of
Androgyne, New York: Harper and Row,
L. S. A. M. R(imer,t,Ueberdie comparable age, occurs only with the rise
androgynische Idee des Lebens," of industrial society in Europe and North
Iahrbuch fiir sexueUe Zwischenstufen, 5 America in the eighteenth and nineteenth
(19031, 709-940: June Singer, Androg- centuries; in Mediterranean countries the
yny: Toward a New of Sexuofit~,
shift remains incomplete, and in much of
Garden City, NY:Anchor Press/
Doubleday, 1976. the world has barely begun or has not
Wayne R. Dynes occurred at all.
Attempts at explaining the new
homosexual pattern include keying it to a
ANDROPHILIA change in heterosexual marriage, which
This rarely used term serves to led the way by becoming more compan-
focus attentionon thosehomosexuals who ionate and less asymmetrical; to the rise of
are exclusively interested in adult part- the democratic ideal; to demographic
ners rather than adolescents and children. changes such as increased life expectan-
In our society such a focus would seem cies; and to changes in the social treat-
self-explanatory, inherent in the defini- ment of youth which made the young less
tion of homosexuality itself. Yet in other available as sexual partners. Nevertheless,
societies, such as ancient Greece, China, the dynamics behind this fundamental
and Islam, and in many tribal groups, age- transition remain historically mysterious,
graded differenceswere or are the norm in a major challenge to any attempt to draw
same-sex conduct in contradistinction up a reasonably comprehensive history of
with androphilia, which is most familiar homosexuality.
to us. Because of the prevalence of andro- Wayne R. Dynes
philia in modem Western culture, its as-
sumptions are sometimes unwittingly or
deliberately imported into other settings; ANGLICANISM
some discussions of homosexual behavior Anglicanism, or Episcopalianism
in creece, for example, tend to as it is also termed, is a worldwide Chris-
tian religious fellowship, stemming from
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