Lions(1993), and taught for a time at Columbia Uni-
versity in New York and Ohio University in Athens,
Ohio. He later won a lawsuit against the Iranian gov-
ernment, which was thought to have supported Hez-
bollah, and in 2002 won millions of dollars from
frozen Iranian assets held in the United States. With
those proceeds, he launched several charities, in-
cluding the Father Lawrence Jenco Foundation and
a program to build schools in Vietnam. In 2004, An-
derson ran as a Democrat for Ohio’s Twentieth Sen-
ate District, losing to an appointed incumbent, Joy
Padgett, whose campaign accused Anderson of be-
ing “soft on terrorism.”
Further Reading
Anderson, Terry A.Den of Lions: Memoirs of Seven
Years. New York: Crown, 1993.
Masland, Tom, Jennifer Foote, and Theresa Wal-
drop. “How Terry Survived.”Newsweek, December
16, 1991.
Say, Peggy.Forgotten: A Sister’s Struggle to Save Terr y An-
derson, America’s Longest Held Hostage. New York:
Simon & Schuster, 1991.
Weir, Ben.Hostage Bound, Hostage Free. Philadelphia:
Westminster Press, 1987.
Bill Knight
See also Beirut bombings; Middle East and North
America; Terrorism.
Androgyny
Definition The mixture of traditionally masculine
and feminine traits in the same individual
During the 1980’s, androgyny became more common as an
avenue of expression for popular singers and musicians, as
a political statement of equality, and as a fashion state-
ment.
“Androgyny,” from the Greekandro(for “man”) and
gyne(for “woman”), has been most commonly de-
fined as the merging of feminine and masculine
gender traits. It also has been equated with sexual
ambiguity, gender ambiguity, hermaphroditism, ho-
mosexuality, bisexuality, transsexuality, and cross-
dressing. Native American cultures have a tradition
of reverence for the gender-blending “two-spirit per-
son.” In most Western cultures, stable gender identi-
ties have been strongly encouraged by the cultures’
dominant ideologies, so androgyny usually has been
considered to be deviant, subversive, or both. As a re-
sult, several movements in the 1980’s—both pop cul-
tural and political—seized upon androgyny as a sym-
bol or expression of alternative culture.
Early Representations An article in the journal
Family Relationsin 1980 announced that a trend to
watch in the coming decade was the emergence of
“more androgynous people.” Androgyny had ex-
isted in multiple forms for hundreds of years, but the
journal had noticed a distinctive increase in the
mainstream representation of androgyny and its in-
corporation into fashion and other aspects of popu-
lar culture.
In the early twentieth century, psychologist Carl
Jung argued that blending gender characteristics—
the female archetype anima with the male animus—
was essential to a person’s psychological and social
growth. Jung’s ideas and the ideas of other psycholo-
gists continued through the century and were espe-
cially relevant to writers and researchers in the 1970’s
and 1980’s who began to argue for an androgynous
ideal for women and men.
Literary critic and novelist Carolyn Heilbrun, in
Toward a Recognition of Androgyny(1973), and psy-
chologist Sandra Bem, in her journal article “The
Measurement of Psychological Androgyny” (1974),
were among the first to introduce androgyny as a
subject worth studying. Heilbrun surveyed litera-
ture for examples of androgynous characters and
themes, and Bem developed the Bem Sex Role In-
ventory to measure self-conceptions of femininity
and masculinity. Also, Bem showed that androgy-
nous persons blend characteristics of both, and she
argued that androgynous individuals are not “sex-
typed”; that is, they express their gender based on a
given situation rather than on culturally prescribed
gender roles.
Political Equality Some American feminists of the
1970’s and 1980’s believed that women would be ac-
cepted as equals in the workplace if they took on
“ideal” masculine behaviors: dressing in power suits,
not showing emotions, taking chances, and so forth.
Men, too, it was argued, could benefit from taking
on what were considered ideal feminine characteris-
tics: empathy and care, nurturance, emotional ex-
pressiveness, cooperation, and the like.
The prime-time television soap operasDallasand
Dynastyshowed best the androgynous “power dress-56 Androgyny The Eighties in America