Androgyny in Contemporary British Literature : Evolution and Metamorphoses of a Myth.
This study tackles the aesthetics, politics and ethics of androgyny, focusing on five novels of contemporary British writers: Brigid Brophy's In Transit, Angela Carter's The Passion of New Eve, Jeanette Winterson's Written on the Body, Peter Ackroyd's Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem and Will Self's Cock and Bull. The first part examines the aesthetic dimension of androgyny, a myth of metamorphic value that destabilizes notions of space, time, bodily constraints and gendered identity. The second part analyses the interplay between the grotesque and hybrid dimensions of the hermaphroditic body in reclaiming the monstrous as a means to renegotiate identity in terms of a multiplicity and to redefine the relationship of the individual to Otherness. This finally allows to examine the political and ethical values of the hermaphrodite that articulates the non‐foundational Levinasian ethics of alterity with the more practical approach to otherness of the ethics of care.