21st Century Neo-androgyny: What is androgyny anymore and why we should still care.

Abstract

Highlights• Psychological Androgyny has been an essential part of identity research since the 1970s. It now languishes in the background.. • Cultural changes, support for the masculine model, and conflation of terminology have led many researchers to abandon the notion. • This new theory address fundamental flaws in the original model.• We present a new theory refuting the criticisms of the traditional model. IntroductionThis paper is based on our previous theory of social (positive, desirable) and anti-social (negative, undesirable) androgyny (see Samuels, 2003, 2004). The concept of androgyny is a contentious and amorphous one-a conflation of the two Greek words 'andro,' meaning male, and 'gyne,' meaning female, with altered meanings over time. A wide selection of human interests use or discuss androgyny, from the sciences of biology, archaeology, anthropology, and history, to the humanities of psychology, sociology, the literary arts of history, poetry, fiction, and philosophy, and on to the visual arts. This paper has a specific focus that can best be understood by asking what new concepts are needed to understand psychological androgyny within human bio-psycho-social development? Although sex and gender are removed from the context of androgyny in this theory, androgyny has traditionally centered on gender as a psychological construct.The notion of androgyny in humans has referred to myriad and variable constructions of literal and figurative images of woman-in-man and man-in-woman (Ramet, 1996). According to Saenz de Tejada (1994), it was Plato, born around 420 BC, who first revealed the word 'androgyny' in his Symposium, and unification of the sexes in some form has often served as a symbol of salvation (Author 1, 2013).When referring to people, androgyny has two forms, physical and psychological. The definition of a physically androgynous individual is the only term that is not ambivalent in the broader community and refers to a person who is partly male and partly female in appearance. Some who identify as non-binary or genderqueer choose an appearance that matches their innately androgynous gender identity (see later).