SOURCE: Lamont-Stewart, Linda. “Androgyny as Resistance to Authoritarianism in Two Postmodern Canadian Novels.” Mosaic 30, no. 3 (September 1997): 115-30.

In the following essay, Lamont-Stewart traces how Green Grass, Running Water and Timothy Findley's Not Wanted on the Voyage “challenge the authoritarian ideology of the Judaeo-Christian tradition which is the foundation of Western culture.”

Among the many secrets that Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has disclosed in her Epistemology of the Closet, the one which is most crucial to gender studies in the broadest sense is the agenda that lies hidden in the concept of androgyny. According to Sedgwick, far from offering a way out of the heterosexual bind—as earlier critics like Carolyn Heilbrun had speculated—discourse about androgyny has tended merely to replicate “the trope of inversion” (87), reinforcing the binary oppositions inherent in traditional notions of sex, gender, and sexuality. Registering a similar kind of discontent and looking for a solution...