Androgyny Quotes

As to sex, the original pleasure, I cannot recommend too highly the advantages of androgyny. ~ Jan Morris

The clarity of gender makes possible the human dialectic. Let the lines of balanced tension go slack and the structure dissolves into the ooze of androgyny and narcissism. ~ Bill Vaughan

Much popular self-help literature normalizes sexism. Rather than linking habits of being, usually considered innate, to learned behavior that helps maintain and support male domination, they act as those these difference are not value laden or political but are rather inherent and mystical. In these books male inability and/or refusal to honestly express feelings is often talked about as a positive masculine virtue women should learn to accept rather than a learned habit of behavior that creates emotional isolation and alienation ... Self-help books that are anti-gender equality often present women's overinvestment in nurturance as a 'natural,' inherent quality rather than a learned approach to caregiving. Much fancy footwork takes place to make it seem that New Age mystical evocations of yin and yang, masculine and feminine androgyny, and so on, are not just the same old sexist stereotypes wrapped in more alluring and seductive packaging. ~ Bell Hooks

Androgyny refers to a specific way of joining the 'masculine' and 'feminine' aspects of a single human being. ~ June Singer

In the early 1830s the writer George Sand, a woman, had a man's overcoat and a pair of boots made for her so she could have the same pleasure - to walk the streets of Paris free to look at whatever she liked. In her autobiography she writes: "I can't express the pleasure my boots gave me ... With those little iron-shot heels, I was on solid pavement. I flew from one end of Paris to the other. It seemed to me that I could go round the world. And then, my clothes feared nothing. I ran out in every kind of weather, I came home at every sort of hour ... No one paid any attention to me, and no one guessed at my disguise ... No one knew me, no one looked at me, no one found fault with me; I was an atom lost in that immense crowd. ~ Randon Billings Noble

I think that androgyny is so amazing. Men's shows I can look at and say, 'I would wear that.' But there's things I see at Nina Ricci, and I'm like, 'They need to make that in men's,' or 'I want those pants.' Everything is inspiring. ~ Mark Indelicato

Unlike those in power here on CIEL, reproduction wasn't what we mourned. We mourned the carnal. Societies may be organized around procreation, but individuals are animals. I think we craved her sexuality -- her sexual reality. The fact of her body. Not particularly female, leaning toward male, an exquisite androgyny. Her head of thick black hair a mighty emblem of desire. ~ Lidia Yuknavitch

In my philosophy, the wry androgyny doesn't have any meaning. I think there is no difference between men and women. We are different in bod, but sense, spirit and soul are the same ~ Yohji Yamamoto

I experimented with fashion as it being more like art, allowing what I wore to express what I was feeling on the inside. Androgyny, rock culture, and grunge - they definitely had an effect on the things that made me feel cool and comfortable. ~ Ruby Rose

My style is scruffy with a touch of androgyny. ~ Sadie Frost

Homosexuality, like androgyny, might be an instinctive racial response to overpopulation, crowding, and stress. Both flourish when empire reaches its apogee. ~ Edward Abbey

Based on these interviews, he compiled a list of ten dimensions of complexity-ten pairs of apparently antithetical characteristics that are often both present in the creative minds. The list includes:

1. Bursts of impulsiveness that punctuate periods of quiet and rest.

2. Being smart yet extremely naive.

3. Large amplitude swings between extreme responsibility and irresponsibility.

4. A rooted sense of reality together with a hefty dose of fantasy and imagination.

5. Alternating periods of introversion and extroversion.

6. Being simultaneously humble and proud.

7. Psychological androgyny-no clear adherence to gender role stereotyping.

8. Being rebellious and iconoclastic yet respectful to the domain of expertise and its history.

9. Being on one had passionate but on the other objective about one's own work.

10. Experiencing suffering and pain mingled with exhilaration and enjoyment. ~ Mario Livio

Three, community built on androgynous identity will mean the end of transsexuality as we know it. Either the transsexual will be able to expand his/her sexuality into a fluid androgyny, or, as roles disappear, the phenomenon of transsexuality will disappear and that energy will be transformed into new modes of sexual identity and behavior. ~ Andrea Dworkin

It was a rotten time to try to be a man in America. Until Blue came along I'd never even spent time around a man. Hell, I'd never even seen one. Where were all the men in this once great land? ~ Sol Luckman

Ever since I was little, I showed traits of both masculine and feminine energies. Androgyny was never something that I thought about or tried for. ~ Shamir

I was always into very androgynous things. Guys, girls ... I'm into androgyny in general. ~ Evan Rachel Wood

The 1970s and 1980s: feminism, androgyny, modernism, aesthetics

In the 1970s and 1980s, Woolf studies expanded in a number of directions,
most notably in relation to feminism. Critical interest in Woolf developed at the same time as feminism developed in related academic disciplines. In this period her writings became central to the theoretical framing of feminism, in
particular to debates on Marxist and materialist feminism and to the emergent theories of androgyny. Both these areas of debate takeWoolf 's A Room of One's Own as a major point of reference...
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At the same time as feminist approaches to Woolf were developing and expanding, so, too, was the critical interest in her modernist theories and her formal aesthetics. Again, Woolf 's writing became central to critical and theoretical formulations on modernism.

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This period also saw considerable critical interest in the influence of the visual arts on Woolf 's writing, and particularly in the influence of the formalist theories of her Bloomsbury colleagues Roger Fry and Clive Bell. ~ Jane Goldman

I'm in favour of hipster androgyny: Any trend that permits men to rebel against strict gender rules of appearance is going to make the world a more expressive and sensitive place for all of us. ~ Russell Smith

Androgyny suggests a spirit of reconciliation between the sexes ... ~ Carolyn Heilbrun

said the bald little androgyny. ~ Dan Simmons

Some women tend naturally to be Warriors and Seekers, and some men to be Caregivers and Lovers in spite of their cultural conditioning. The point is for both to take their journeys in such a way as to find their own way to be male or female, and eventually to achieve a positive kind of androgyny, which is not at all about unisex, neutered behavior, but is about gaining the gifts both gender energies and experiences have to offer us. ~ Carol S. Pearson

Androgyny is not trying to manage the relationship between the opposites; it is simply flowing between them. ~ June Singer

As I've said before, "the Mod generation", contrary to popular belief, was not born in even 1958, but in the 1920s after a steady gestation from about 1917 or so. Now, Mod certainly came of age, fully sure of itself by 1958, completely misunderstood by 1963, and in a perpetual cycle of reinvention and rediscovery of itself by 1967 and 1975, respectively, but it was born in the 1920s, and I will maintain this. I don't care who disagrees with me, and there are dozens of reasons that I do so - from the Art Deco aesthetic, to flapper fashions (complete with bobbed hair), to androgyny and subtle effeminacy, to jazz. ~ Ruadhan J. McElroy

Homosexuality appeared as one of the forms of sexuality when it was transposed from the practice of sodomy onto a kind of interior androgyny, a hermaphrodism of the soul. The sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species ~ Michel Foucault

There is a certain androgyny to my appeal. ~ Ellen Barkin