ADROGYNIST POETICS: A JOURNEY BEYOND GENDER

Abstract

Adrogyny was for Virginia Woolf, a way for liberating women from the negativism of patriarchy. It was a kind of parable containing a solution to the dilemma of the feminist at war with herself. Like Woolf, Adrienne charts new territory for contemporary wemyn by asserting her purpose for writing directly and overtly as a womyn, out of a womyn’s body and experience. Attempting to recover the lost history of wemyn, she examines the mythic and anthropological prehistory of motherhood in Western culture, the modern domination of the birth process by male physicians, the psychological roots of “matrophobia,” and the mother-daughter bond. It locates the figure of mother as an important object of exploration in relation to the birth of the feminist daughter. Rich insists on the need to transform all relationships in an effort to create an egalitarian society that would be free from any kind of domination, violence, and polarization. She endorses radical concept of wemyn-centered vision, whose goal is not equality but utter transformation.