“The Stranger” by Adrienne Rich

 

Rich, Adrienne, et al. Collected Poems: 1950-2012. W.W. Norton & Company, 2016.

 

Looking as I’ve looked before, straight down the heart

of the street to the river

walking the rivers of the avenues

feeling the shudder of the caves beneath the asphalt

watching the lights turn on in the towers

walking as I’ve walked before

like a man, like a woman, in the city

my visionary anger cleansing my sight

and the detailed perceptions of mercy

flowering from that anger

 

if I come into a room out of the sharp misty light

and hear them talking a dead language

if they ask me my identity

what can I say but

I am the androgyne

I am the living mind you fail to describe

in your dead language

the lost noun, the verb surviving

only in the infinitive

the letters of my name are written under the lids

of the newborn child

 

This poem, by Adrienne Rich, identifies the poet herself as “the androgyne,” describing herself as “like a man, like a woman.” This claim, along with the flowery language of the poem, pulls Rich out of the realm of the real and into the realm of the symbolic. However, as a consequence, this relegates androgyny into the realm of the artistic.

Rich enjoyed toying around with the figure of the androgyne, but this is the clearest statement of who the androgyne actually is. The language is cryptic, and statements like “the lost noun, the verb surviving / only in the infinitive” seem to mean less than they do evoke a certain incomprehensibility; in other words, they seem to be not a clue to the meaning of Rich’s androgyne, but rather confuse the reader in the way that Rich believes the androgyne would.

I find this rather uncomfortable. Rich describes the androgyne as something that can’t truly be understood in binary language (“the living mind you fail to describe / in your dead language”) but at the same time the fact that she writes this poetry implies that on some deep level she does understand the androgyne. I dislike this because it appropriates the image of the androgyne from a still-binary perspective, as Rich identified as a woman. Can androgyny be written in our dead language? Possibly more importantly, can it be written by a man or a woman?

In the 70s and 80s, around the time of the second wave, the pop-culture phenomenon of glam rock emerged. In style, this was most easily recognizable by outlandish costumes and overt campiness, often crossing over with androgyny. One of the most popular figures of glam rock was without a doubt David Bowie, famous for his gender-bending fashion.

Even artists in superficially unrelated genres picked up on the popularity of this androgyny: Prince, Boy George, and Freddie Mercury are all examples of this. It is an interesting question why androgyny was so common in pop culture, but in my opinion the most natural answer is merely that it had shock value. In the same way that Bowie, Madonna, even Lindsay Lohan dabbled in Kabbalah for the trendy occultist sheen, androgyny could be used to one’s advantage in appearing uniquely avant-garde.

However, this is not to disparage the use of androgyny in pop music. Even if it was a cynical manipulation of popular tastes, the promotion of androgyny as acceptable (just think of the famous lines “You’ve got your mother in a whirl / She’s not sure if you’re a boy or a girl” from Rebel Rebel) should be taken as an absolute positive.

If it makes sense to argue that popular promotion of androgyny can be good regardless of ulterior motive, it makes sense to ask to what extent such pop music can be considered as feminist poetry. Through exploration of feminine identity, the glam trend naturally has feminist undertones, and music can certainly be interpreted as poetry, so it must be considered as such to some degree. However, I would argue that this argument cannot go very far, as glam undermines its own “purpose” through its celebration of superficiality and vapidity. In other words, how can glam be taken seriously when it makes a point of taking everything too lightly?

It is all too easy in a project on second-wave feminism to fall into the trap of focusing on too narrow a perspective, so with this segment I hope to justify the treatment of the liminal body as an object of global interest. To do this, we look to several androgynous figures in mythology around the globe.

Starting in Greece, we look to the mythological figures of Tiresias and Iphis. Tiresias, according to myth, came across a pair of snakes in coitus, upon which he beat them with a stick. As punishment, he was transformed into a woman. Living as a woman, he became a priestess and had children. After seven years, he came across another pair of snakes, and this time stepped upon them, and was transformed back into a man. According to the most popular version of the legend, he was later called by Zeus and Hera as first-hand source in a debate over whether men or women had more pleasure in sex: when he responded that women did, Hera blinded him, but Zeus gave him as apology the gift of clairvoyance. Iphis, a figure in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, was born to two peasants who could not afford a dowry and so resolved to kill their child if he were not male. Iphis was born “female,” but his mother raised him as male so he would not be killed by his father. Eventually, when it came time for Iphis to marry, Isis miraculously transformed Iphis into a biological male. Both of these figures are remarkable in how they are clearly liminal figures without ever being in an androgynous state: their genders are always determined at any given moment, but are not temporally consistent.

Next, we look to the figure of Inari (稲荷), one of the most important Shinto kami, probably best translated into English as “spirits.” Inari is the kami of foxes (among many other things), often portrayed as tricksters in Japanese mythology. Inari is variously depicted as male, female, or androgynous. Their messenger animals, foxes, are in mythology considered able to transform into human women in order to seduce men and have children.

There are many other examples of gender-ambiguous gods or mythological figures—for three interesting examples not covered here: the first people in the Dogon religion, the Aztec god Xochipilli, and the Sumerian Gala. However, rather than provide more examples of myths of liminality, it seems more of interest to provide examples of people actually considered to be non-male and non-female in non-binary gender systems, such as:

• Chilean (Mapuche) Machi: these religious leaders are considered to transcend the male-female binary, channeling different identities depending on the actions they are taking;
• Tahitian (Maohi) Māhū: this term, meaning “in the middle,” refers to assigned-male-at-birth people who act in an ambiguously feminine role;
• The great many identities coming under the compass of “two-spirit”—a term introduced in 1990 to refer to the variety of third-gender roles in North American native cultures, such as:
  • Navajo nádleeh
  • Mohave alyha
  • Zuni lhamana
  • Lakota wínkte

Although I cannot possibly cover all of these mythological entities as well as non-binary and gender variant identities, hopefully the idea that the liminal form is not restricted to “Western culture” has been justified.

One of the most well-known and oft-quoted fragments of text in history must be the first three-line poem of Genesis (quoted here in two translations):

“God created humans in his image,

In his image he created him,

Male and female he created them.” (Alter translation)

 

“So God created man in his own image,

in the image of God created he him;

male and female created he them.” (King James Version)

If “male and female” were created both in God’s image, does this imply that God is a liminal form? Certainly he is not traditionally depicted as such—throughout the canon of “western art” He is shown as an old man. However, the picture gets more complicated when one considers also the traditional images of angels: neither male nor female, they are usually shown as perfectly androgynous “beautiful” forms.

Through the Old Testament canon, God is usually not present as such, but rather appears as an “angel of the presence” (Isaiah 63:9). Through this insight, we see that God’s presence can be naturally interpreted as androgynous in accordance with Christian tradition.

In Jewish tradition, much more thought has been given to the liminal God. In Kabbalah, a traditional form of rabbinic esotericism, God, or “Ein Sof,” is shown as a series of 10 interconnected aspects—the Sefirot. Together, the Sephirot form a complete image of God; they are all crucial aspects of Him. It is no coincidence that roughly half of these “emanations” are considered “feminine”—most relevantly, beauty.

This gives us a very interesting look into liminality—androgyny is often seen as superhuman, divine, or perhaps indescribable beauty. Likewise, those who seek to defile this divine form are held in the lowest possible regard. For instance, Lot offers to let the men of Sodom and Gomorrah rape his two daughters in order for them not to assault the angels of the Lord. The men refuse, attracted presumably by the angels’ divine beauty. This immediately proceeds the two cities’ absolute destruction at the hands of God.

It should come as no surprise, then, that unholy beings like demons might have these traits too, seeing as such unholy beings are often seen as warped or distorted versions of holy beings. For notable examples, many demons of Abrahamic traditions are taken from idols of other cultures, such as Ba’al. Idol worship is sinful in the bible because it is treating a creature that is not God as if it were God, and thus there must be a disturbing parallel between the traits of an unholy idol and the traits of a holy being. For another example of this, look to Revelations, in which the Antichrist is mistaken for the second coming of Christ.

Esoteric faiths often borrow as higher entities such idols (or such demons, depending on one’s point of view). Thus it is only natural that esoteric higher entities often have warped versions of the features of God and His angels. In particular, for the purpose of this project, their androgyny.

Some Tarot decks, for example, adopt as its highest trump card an image very reminiscent of that of an angel, most notably the iconic Rider-Waite deck. The card is full of imagery from Revelations, so a figure representing duality unified is only natural.

For a darker example, we look to the image of the Sabbatic Goat, traditionally associated with the demon Baphomet. Originally invented as the demon the Knights Templar were accused of worshipping, Aleister Crowley’s esoteric faith took it on as a higher power. It shows a unification of beast and man, man and woman, up and down, and dissolution and reconstitution. It is in this depiction of a liminal form that we begin to see not the supposed “divine beauty” of androgyny, but rather a kind of cosmic horror and lack of understanding, reminiscent of Lovecraft’s Great Old Ones.

This is undeniably poetic: the physical representation of the unification of opposites itself has two opposite interpretations, one of superhuman beauty and one of grotesque unnaturality—two sides of the same coin.