The Second Wave

Abstract

‘The early seventies were a good time to be flat-chested,’ Cal recalls, remembering his adolescent girlhood in Middlesex: ‘Androgyny was in’ (p. 304). By the 1970s, androgyny was ‘an idea whose time had come’ as social scientists ‘rediscovered’ the concept.¹ It wasn’t just social scientists who had rediscovered it, though: within second wave feminism and in literature, androgyny heralded the possibility of ‘a much broader range of sex-role possibilities for members of both sexes’.² It was also perceived as the expression of ‘a psychic unity, either potential or actual, conceived as existing in all individuals’.³ Androgyny was in the head, on the body, an attitude, a way of being, in the psyche, cosmic, unisex, bisex. The ubiquity of the concept and the ways in which it was deployed have made the term a nebulous one: when we speak of androgyny, when someone is described as androgynous, when androgyny is cited as a particular aspiration, what exactly do we mean by the term, what does it describe, what are we talking about? Even a brief glance at books and articles written between the 1960s and 1990s tells us that androgyny was a protean concept whose function shifted according to the discourse that constructed it.