Haunted by the Gynander: Disruptive Genders

Abstract

Josephin Peladan was a Rosicrucian whose book The Gynander was, as Dijkstra points out, written in the closing years of the nineteenth century and thus ‘inevitably full of Darwinian cliches’ (Dijkstra 1986, p. 273). One of a substantial body of texts produced in that era in response to the first wave of the women’s liberation movement, it is representative of the genre in its anxious attempt to recruit all the authoritative voices of the age to its cause. By appropriating both religion (Catholic Christianity) and science (albeit botany!) and tying these together with historical fantasies about classical Greece (a cultural ideal for his peers), Peladan is laying claim to the most unyielding of foundations for discourses of inversion. As we have seen, contemporary science has yet to outgrow this intellectual legacy of the nineteenth century.

The androgyne… is the virginal adolescent male, still somewhat feminine, while the gynander can only be the woman who strives for male characteristics, the sexual usurper; the feminine form aping the masculine! …The first originates in the Bible and designates the initial stage of human development; the Graeco-Catholic tradition has consecrated its use, whereas I have taken the other from botany, and with it I baptize not the sodomite but any tendency on the part of woman to take on the role of a man

(Josephin Peladan The Gynander, 1891, cited in Dijkstra 1986, p. 273)

‘Feminine’ was a test, like some witch trial she was pre-ordained to fail.

(Barbara Kingsolver Prodigal Summer)