Sexuality and American Culture

Sorry this is so late, everyone. I almost forgot about last Thursday's readings. I really wanted to be in class too.

The beginning of book 3 in Middlesex, where Calliope’s life story begins, illustrates well the repression theory that Foucault introduced in The History of Sexuality. Callie has grown up in a household where anything related to bodily functions, including sex, was not discussed. Tessie would not discuss anything remotely sexual in front of her daughter, while Milton did not give Callie the sex talk. Even the family doctor, Dr. Phil, was not much help to Callie because of his old age and cursory checkups. This left Calliope with questions but no answers about how her body should be like. She couldn’t ask anyone about her body because she knew that no one would give a response, so she believed that her body parts were normal.

This changed after the accident with the tractor and Callie had to go to New York City. Here the ideology of scientia sexualis comes into play. Dr. Luce, a researcher of sexual disorders, tries to get the truth of Callie’s sexuality out of her through a psychological evaluation. The idea was to see if upbringing had an effect on Calliope’s gender identity. However, there was a flaw in Luce’s plan and Foucault’s scientia sexualis: instead of telling the doctor the whole truth, Callie lied so that she would appear to be a normal teenage girl. She had no reason to say what she really felt because if she did, she could be seen as abnormal. The truth would not have set her free, but made things worse.

One of the reasons why Dr. Luce was so curious about Calliope’s condition was because not much was known about hermaphroditisim. According to the Webster’s dictionary that Callie looked at, one of the synonyms for “hermaphrodite” was “monster.”  The idea of a person having two sex organs and other sex characteristics of both male and female must have seemed so abhorrent that “monster” is an appropriate term to describe the person. Even today, not much is known about hermaphrodites beyond the biological characteristics. In defining gender roles, hermaphrodites are in a gray area. Are they supposed to act like men or women?

This also applies to the case of Christine Jorgensen, although in her case she was once a biological male, not a hermaphrodite. Back when it was believed Jorgensen was a hermaphrodite, her change from male to female was accepted because she might have had both sex organs to begin with. In Serlin’s essay on Jorgensen, he says that every word Jorgensen said and every move she made was calculated so that the American public would accept the sex change. But after it was discovered six months later that she was only an “altered male,” the public began to turn on her because her actions were seen as unnatural. Jorgensen is still the same person she was when the story first came out, but because people now know “she” was once a “he” instead of in between, the sex change was seen as a rejection of Jorgensen’s gender identity, which was unacceptable to the dominant society.