Androgyny is a term derived from the Greek andras (avSpaq—man) and gyne {yovx\—woman) referring to either the absence of any distinguishing masculine or feminine traits, as in the Hijras of India, or the combination of both masculine and feminine characteristics, whether spiritual, psychological, or physiological.
Most Western cultures presume a binary opposition between male and female. In the 1950s, June Singer revived a mystical interest in androgyny, reconciling the "masculine" and "feminine" aspects of a single human, restoring the balance between what Jung called animus and anima. Like Mircea Eliade and Carl Jung, Singer treated androgyny as archetypal, in which the divided self yearned for the complete reunion of male and female. This understanding of androgyny as a metaphysical ideal was implicit in shamans or deities like Buddha, Shiva, Kuan Yin, and Elohim. Even so, Singer believed that the sexes were naturally differentiated: that males are generally aggressive, dominant, hard, and logical, and women are passive, compliant, soft, and intuitive.
In 1974, Sandra Bern published the Bern Sex Role Inventory (BSRI), a self-test listing 20 socially desirable female traits, 20 socially desirable male traits, and 20 considered to be neutral. Male traits included "forceful," "analytical," and "self-sufficient"; female traits included "sympathetic," "loyal," and "compas-sionate"; and neutral items included "truthful," "sincere," and "friendly." Scores revealed the respondent's self-reported possession of socially desirable, stereotypically masculine and feminine personality characteristics. An individual who received high scores for both female and male traits was defined as androgynous, whereas one with low scores in both was described as undifferentiated. Gender traits had little correlation with the ascribed sex of participants. Like Singer and Jung, Bern believed that people who had androgynous psychological traits were the most effective and well-functioning individuals in society.
For more info search in google using tags like education administration, second degree burns, special education, north carolina education lottery, life experience degree, criminal justice degree, sc education lottery, sex education, us department of education, master degree online program, education quotes, mississippi department of education, education jobs, physical education, kentucky department of education, secondary education, pearson education, education degree, elementary education, degree directory, distance learning degree it, online psychology degree, online degree in education, head of education agency, brown vs board of education, bachelors degree.
At this time, Constructivism claimed that gender was socially constructed and could therefore be changed at will. Resistance to gender binaries and heterosexuality took the form of transvestitism, or performances as drag queens or drag kings. Kate Bornstein, having performed as a cross-dressing performance artist and encouraged the self-construction of "who you are," used surgery to change herself in 1998 to a "male-to-female lesbian transsexual" but has now settled into being neither male nor female, a gender outlaw.
To describe a born male as "lesbian" indicates some of the conceptual change required by this new gender fluidity, but it did not necessarily accommodate androgyny. A medical category, gender identity disorder, was created to describe those who felt incompatibility between their felt identity and their anatomy. Improvements in surgical processes made it possible to normalize anatomies as normalized male or female, and medical research sought to explain sex "transgres-sions" (gender identity disorder, cross-dressing, or homosexuality) physiologically in order to remove blame and effect a "cure." A few transsexuals, like female-to-male Jamison Green, rejected such normalizing "cures" and accepted their androgynous status to the extent of having hormone treatment but not requiring a surgically constructed penis or denying their past.
Despite a relatively low level of sexual dimor-phism in humans, Charles Darwin had naturalized the sex binary in The Descent of Man by referring to naturally selected sex differences between male and female in gonads, sex organs, body mass, amount and placement of body hair, intelligence, psychological traits such as aggression, and child-rearing practices. But he tended to overlook the high amount of androgyny in the natural world, for instance, in worms and snails. About 30% of the fish species on a coral reef start out as males and end as females, or vice versa, or are both male and female at the same time. Could humans be naturally androgynous?
In 1993 in Bodies That Matter, Judith Butler argued that even though we construct gender, our material bodies sometimes prevent us from conforming to social norms. Earlier in Gender Trouble, she claimed that drag queens in their "queer performativ-ity" demonstrate resistance to being required to "perform" normal dichotomous roles of male or female which they do not feel. The existence of physically androgynous humans challenges those dichotomies at an even more profound level.
Search in Yahoo! for more information on these items. Use phrases like college education, acs education, board of education, online college degree programs, masters degree, college of education, ohio department of education, education manager, nyc department of education, education for er nurse, education lottery, indiana department of education, online education college degree, virginia department of education, jobs, computer education, texas education agency, head of education cabinet agency, continuing education, box tops for education, counseling, distance learning degree, early childhood education, psychology degree, online education, writing education on resume, education specialist, american education services, degree programs, nc education lottery, english degree, santa clara adult education, the north american education institute, online law degree, department of education, home education, university degree online, online degree programs, accredited online degree program, nursing degree, online college degree, higher education, online education college degree, california department of education.
Anne Fausto-Sterling estimates conservatively that 1 in 1,000 persons is born with androgynous physiological features. Previously called hermaphrodites, they are now medically defined as intersex, a term, like androgyny, applied to any person with characteristics determined as neither exclusively male nor female, or combining features of both. The most common cause of so-called sexual ambiguity is congenital adrenal hyperplasia, an endocrine condition in which the adrenal glands produce unusually high levels of virilizing hormones. In genetic females, this leads to an appearance that may be slightly masculinized (large clitoris) to quite masculine. Another form of intersex is andro-gen insensitivity syndrome, in which people born with masculinizing Y chromosomes do not develop male morphology. Other physiological androgynes show chromosome variations such as 47XXY, 45XO, or mosaics. Far from being revered as complete or ideal persons, such anatomical androgynes are usually classified as male or female sex at birth and surgically or hormonally transformed into either male or female in childhood, with remaining variations of the male-female binary seen as transgressive.
Bern and Fausto-Sterling argue that the danger of perpetuating the male-female binary lies in the fact that cultural roles and norms remain dictated by males and highly polarized male values. The placement of the androgyne at the center of our understanding of physical and cultural humanness and our acceptance of complex combinations of male and female defuse current hegemonies.
Felicity Ann Haynes
EDITOR Neil J. Salkind
Copyright © 2008 by SAGE Publications, Inc.
