Androgynous democracy: American modernity and the dual-sexed body politic

"Androgynous Democracy: American Modernity and the Dual-Sexed Body Politic" explores how late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American writers used the concept of androgyny---as it was understood within the specific artistic, religious, scientific, and economic discourses of the time---to design their ideal formulation of the modern body politic. I argue that within these contexts androgyny has come to symbolize both democracy's self-destructive impulses and its potential for gender, racial, and social equality. As a means of providing the proper historical context for the study, chapter one broadly sketches androgyny's reception in the pre-national and antebellum periods, specifically highlighting how the Transcendentalists' affirmative vision of androgyny stemmed from the "organic" nationalist principles of the early German romantic Johann Gottfried von Herder. The second chapter then examines how Henry James grappled with the implications of his own homosexuality (understood then as "psychical androgyny") and international citizenship as the United States reassessed who was included in the post-Reconstruction body politic. In chapter three I explain how evolutionary science's notion of "atavistic androgyny" provided Frank Norris and Charlotte Perkins Gilman with different ways to understand the liberal subject's place within a pre-World War I economy that increasingly blurred the lines between "masculine" production and "feminine" consumption. Chapter four addresses the reactionary and radical politics of the 1930s South. Both conservative agrarian John Crowe Ransom and proletarian writer Grace Lumpkin evoked the dual-sexed body politic during the Great Depression, though with very different political agendas in mind. The final chapter turns to W. E. B. Du Bois's radical reformulation of the black folk/volk. His paradigm had later implications for the Harlem Renaissance writer Marita Bonner, whose androgynous urban characters grappled with a modern polis separated as much by race as by gender and sexuality. The Epilogue then considers how Rosie the Riveter's appearance on the cover of The Saturday Evening Post in 1943 anticipated a larger debate during and after second-wave feminism about the efficacy and assumptions of androgyny.