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One of the most complex issues that has been debated in gender studies is the problematics of subject formation, particularly of the gendered subject. Whether viewing gender as irreducible difference located in the body, or as a discursive construct, the argument has centered on a heterosexual norm that assumes a division between masculine and feminine identities, one that is specifically implicated in relations of power and domination. Yet, historically, traditional discourse has offered an alternative to this binary opposition, and one that appears, on one level, to reinforce the constructivist position, thus minimizing the role of anatomy in defining gender identity. This alternative is androgyny. Androgyny, presumably inherent in one way or the other in all of us, functions as a third term that neutralizes the gendered way in which the subject is constructed. In this sense, androgyny can be seen as a space of resistance that redefines the ways in which gender identity is constructed.
One of the problems with the concept of androgyny, however, is its linguistic indeterminacy. Described by Mary Daly as a "semantic abomination" (387), the meaning of the term remains hard to pinpoint. Cheryl Walker, for example, emphasizes that androgyny is "not sexual hermaphroditism but spiritual bisexuality," while "androgyny" is used by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar to describe the concept of the "multiform" self exemplified in Virginia Woolf's Orlando, whose androgyny is "a sort of wardrobe of male and female selves" (345). Yet it is precisely this "combination of distorted gender descriptions" which Daly rejects as "a vacuum that sucks its spellbound victims into itself" (387-88).
The difficulty of determining the function of androgyny is further aggravated by its clear grounding in patriarchal thought. As Julia Kristeva has shown at length in Tales of Love, the original Western depiction of the androgyne in Plato's Symposium is a product of a patriarchal desire for wholeness which excludes femininity rather than accepting it: "The androgyne does not love, he admires himself in another androgyne and sees only himself, rounded, faultless, otherless. Coalescing in himself, he cannot even coalesce: he is fascinated with his own image" (70). Androgyny thus becomes only one more way to assimilate otherness, or, as Helene Cixous puts it, to re-enforce the "Empire of the Selfsame:" "a fantasy...