Androgyny

St. James Encyclopedia of Pop Culture by Shaun Frentner

The blurring of the sexes has been a mainstay throughout the history of representational art, and popular art of the twentieth century has not broken with this tendency. Whether through consciously manipulated personae or otherwise, countless stars of film, television, and pop music have displayed again and again that the division between masculine and feminine is often a frail one, and in many cases have served to help reverse "natural" standards altogether. Furthermore, while a number of androgynous figures in the media have sometimes become icons of gay and lesbian fans, many others have traversed the fantasy realms of heterosexual markets, challenging at yet another level the supposedly discrete categories of personal identity.

Of all of its many forms, the most obvious mode of gender-bending in popular culture has been drag. Male and female cross-dressing, however, has often been given unequal weight and meaning. On the one hand, men in women's clothes have most often been utilized for comic effect, from television comedian Milton Berle in the 1950s, to cartoon rabbit Bugs Bunny, and on to numerous characters on the In Living Color program in the 1990s. Females in drag, on the other hand, are rarely used in the same way, and to many connote a coded lesbianism rather than obvious slapstick comedy. German film diva Marlene Dietrich, for example, with the help of photographer Josef von Sternberg, created a seductive self-image wearing men's suits during the 1930s, gaining immense popularity among lesbian audiences--and shocking some conservative straight viewers. While this discrepancy in drag is probably the result of cultural factors, critics have suggested that popular standards of femininity are often already the result of a kind of everyday "costume," whereas masculinity is perceived as somehow more "natural" and unaffected. Reversing these roles, then, has markedly different effects.

If self-conscious drag such as Dietrich's can expose common assumptions of the opposition between masculine and feminine in a bold reversal, many other performers have embraced androgyny in the strictest sense by meeting conceptions of both genders in the middle, often with greater cultural reverberations. When American actress Jean Seberg appeared in the 1959 French film Breathless, for example, her closely cropped hair and boyish frame stood as a challenge to a culture that measured femininity in long tresses of hair and dramatic body curves. Nevertheless, Seberg became a major influence throughout the 1960s and beyond, ushering in a new type of waifish woman into the popular imagination--for example, actress Mia Farrow and models like Twiggy.

Popular male figures have equally relied upon similar gender play, perhaps most visibly within rock music. Beginning in the late 1960s, for example, much of American and British popular music often seemed to be an unequivocal celebration of androgyny. The "glam" scene, represented by acts like Marc Bolan and T-Rex, Bryan Ferry and Roxy Music, Elton John, and Lou Reed pushed costumed excess to new limits with vinyl pants, feather boas, and makeup of all sorts--to the approval of men and women of multiple orientations. Arguably, the most crucial single glam figure was British singer David Bowie, who adopted an ever changing series of ambiguous stage characters, including Aladdin Sane and Ziggy Stardust, highlighting the theatrical nature of all personae, sexual or otherwise. In the wake of glam came the punk and New Romantic movements in the late 1970s and 1980s, exemplified by groups like the Damned, the Cure, and Siouxsie and the Banshees. Although these two strains were often at odds musically, both were often allied in a project of shocking popular middle-class notions of rugged masculinity. Such shock, however, soon elided into popular faddism, and by the early 1980s a number of musical gender "subversives" such as Adam Ant, Prince, and Boy George nestled in Top 40 charts alongside traditional figures of masculinity.

At the same time that self-consciously androgynous entertainers have often "passed" into the acceptance of mainstream audiences, it has also been common for gender bending to appear to be quite unintentional. A strong example of this can be found in the phenomenon of the so-called "haircut" American heavy metal bands of the 1980s such as Poison, Motley Crue, and Winger. While these acts often espoused lyrics of the most extreme machismo, they often bedecked themselves with "feminine" makeup, heavily hairsprayed coifs, and tight spandex pants--in short, in a style similar to the glam rockers of a decade before. Perhaps even more than a conscious artist like Bowie, such ironies demonstrated in a symptomatic way how the signs of gender identification are anything but obvious or natural. Whether fully intended or not, however, images of androgyny continued to thrive into the 1990s and its musicians, actors, and supermodels, as America questioned the divisions of gender and sexuality more than ever.