Quotes & Sayings About Androgyny

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

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

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

All who have brought about a state of sex-consciousness are to blame, and it is they who drive me, when I want to stretch my faculties on a book, to seek it in that happy age ... when the writer used both sides of his mind [the male and female sides of his mind] equally. One must turn back to Shakespeare then, for Shakespeare was androgynous; and so were Keats and Sterne and Cowper and Lamb and Coleridge. Shelley perhaps was sexless. Milton and Ben Jonson had a dash too much of the male in them. So had Wordsworth and Tolstoy. — Virginia Woolf

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

I see fashion as a proclamation or manifestation of identity, so, as long as identities are important, fashion will continue to be important. The link between fashion and identity begins to get real interesting, however, in the case of people who don't fall clearly into a culturally-recognized identity. — Kate Bornstein

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

I was born and raised in Manhattan; I didn't realize that I, in all my androgyny, was a freak to the rest of this country. — IO Tillett Wright

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'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

We don't have a clue what it is to be male or female, or if there are intermediate genders. Male and female might be fields which overlap into androgyny or different kinds of sexual desires. But because we live in a Western, patriarchal world, we have very little chance of exploring these gender possibilities. — Kathy Acker

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

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

I grew up at a time with androgyny in the 1980s; it was easy to pass under the radar as a gay may. — Alexis Arquette

As a concept [androgyny] raise[s] anxiety levels by conjuring up a conformist, unisex vision, the very opposite of the individuality and uniqueness that feminism actually has in mind. — Gloria Steinem

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

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

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

An androgynous mind was not a male mind. It was a mind attuned to the full range of human experience, including the invisible lives of women. — Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

What was so interesting about the glam era was that it was about bisexuality and breaking down the boundaries between gays and straights, breaking down the boundaries between masculinity and femininity with this androgyny thing. — Todd Haynes

said the bald little androgyny. — Dan Simmons

In a sense I portray myself in a very androgynous way, and I love androgyny. — Lady Gaga

A man who from the beginning has long been soaked in the languid atmosphere of a woman, the scent of her hands, her bosom, her knees, her hair, her lithe and flowing clothes ... has acquired a delicacy of skin, a refinement of tone, a kind of androgyny without which the toughest and most virile of geniuses remains, when it comes to artistic perfection, an incomplete being. — Charles Baudelaire

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

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

Nothing is more attractive than universal appeal. That is what makes androgyny the peacekeeping persuasion. — Bauvard

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

It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple; one must be woman-manly or man-womanly ... Some marriage of opposites has to be consummated. — Virginia Woolf

The term 'androgyny' ... defines a condition under which the characteristics of the sexes, and the human impulses expressed by men and women, are not rigidly assigned. Androgyny seeks to liberate the individual from the confines of the appropriate. — Carolyn Heilbrun

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

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

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

A lot of men do have a fear of my ultra-femininity. Sometimes people say I look like a drag queen, that I look scary, but I think that's a fear of my confidence. Most women in contemporary culture pare down their femininity, so there's a slight androgyny about them, and I think men have got used to seeing that. — Paloma Faith

I think the gender story will become less fraught with hard edges - and not that we'll have androgyny, but that men and women will move more fluidly into each other's domains. — Elizabeth Lesser

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

I quite like androgyny. — Bat For Lashes

For example, the call for equal rights has perverted into "let's all be the same." Male and female biological differences are discounted, because "male" and "female" are considered "outdated social constructs," and while that is partially true, the social construct stance becomes clear reductionism when it totally discounts clear differences in male and female biology (i.e., androgyny is not the same as equality). — Gudjon Bergmann

To recommend that women become identical to men, would be simple reversal, and would defeat the whole point of androgyny, and for that matter, feminism: in both, the whole point is choice. — Carolyn Gold Heilbrun

I was inspired by the androgyny of Yohji Yamanoto's designs to translate the clothing's dualities onto screen and image. I was playing with a multitude of influences for the S/S 2012 campaign, inspired by the modernist literature and architecture that is in itself a fusion of political and architectural mantras, both dreamy and concrete. — Collier Schorr