Androgyny: A Cultural Analysis

From the innumerable occasions where androgyny has become a supportive part of the subculture or mainstream culture, its physical connotation has continuously been challenged and appropriated into a unique identity belonging to a specific culture (Eldridge, 2013). Despite so, its poetic has remained unabated through these perpetual perceptible changes (Ibid.). Throughout the evidences of its involvement, one can argue that the unchanging rationale of androgyny itself provides non-binary gender performance and blanket immunity towards freedom of expression away from the constraint of societal values. This can be seen – consciously or subconsciously – as the invisible tool to realise the establishment of neutrality in gender categorisation (Butler,
With the development of gender role equality and LGBTQ positivity, one can argue that androgyny should be discussed as a concept within gender fluidity and performativity. This encompasses the reformed ideas that gender should not be dependent and restricted to biological sex (Malamidis, 2010). Rather, gender is “a stylized repetition of acts… which are internally discontinuous… [so that] the appearance of substance is precisely that, a constructed identity, a performative accomplishment which the mundane social audience, including the actors themselves, come to believe and to perform in the mode of belief” (Butler, 1990). Therefore, gender identity and traits are only real to the extent of which it is performed (Ibid.). This ideology becomes the precedent of the concept of gender fluidity within androgyny, as androgynes are not bound to strictly identify with either of the gender but from time to time are able to rotate between both (van Goor, 2010). Unlike “forced” hegemonic heterosexual model which dictates – based on social construction – gender behaviour as strictly one or the other, it can be contended that androgyny model allows for the blurring of gender binary between femininity and masculinity, and as such, remove the burden of gender-specific subversive performance and give more tolerance to freedom of self-representation – physically and