ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses the apparently inextinguishable interest and fatal attraction of the image of androgyny, and explores whether, and why, it continues to inspire, scare, fascinate and repulse. Using interdisciplinary methods and a broadly feminist media analysis. The chapter ranges over androgyny and its manifestations in film, mythology, religious and philosophical thought, its appearance in the Jungian theory of individuation and the animus/anima dichotomy. It explores how androgyny operates within systems of socio-cultural gender conceptualizations, biological determinism and binary oppositions. The chapter draws on media texts as a means of debating the possibilities of genderless psychological plurality in what remains, even today, a rigid patriarchal ideology of binary oppositions within prescribed modes of being. It shows how genders have been constructed and deconstructed in cultural products by gender politics of dominant systems. The chapter concludes by examining the phenomenon of androgyny as a central concept in humans' fairytale quest for happiness, meaning and the divine self.
