Sexuality and American Culture

      The intervention of medicine in the discourse of sexuality is undeniable. Foucault said it and novels like “Middlesex”, Foucault’s “the history of sexuality” and several other documents support this statement. I might have underestimated how strong the connection between medicine and sexuality is in America but after reading this novel, I surely don’t.

        In Middlesex, the narrator brings our attention to the fact that the doctor who identified him as a girl when he was born and treated him as a girl during his childhood had faulty eyesight, which prevented him from seeing that “she” was in fact a boy. This left me very puzzled. How could a doctor examine a patient for several years and never notice that something is peculiar about his/her genitalia? This is definitely one way for Eugenides to portray the incompetency of many doctors. After all, he is not too much of a fan of the medical system.

          Further in the book, when Cal sees Dr. Luce in New York, after several diagnostic tests, Dr Luce misinterprets the psychological tests by thinking that Cal is attracting to boys and that she enjoyed her first sexual intercourse with a boy, which is not true from Cal’s point of view. So he proposes the idea to make Cal more “feminine” by removing the surplus of male hormones in her body through surgical procedures. However, the unfortunate results would be that Cal won’t be able to experience sexual pleasure. I found interesting how the doctor chose the option of feminizing Cal although he knew that this would result in making Cal unable to experience sexual pleasure. Doctor Luce writes in Cal’s file: “The ability to marry and pass as a normal woman in society are also important goals, both of which will not be possible without feminizing surgery and hormone treatment.” From my own understanding, it seems that Doctor Luce wants to feminize Cal so that he could pass for a “normal” woman, get married and have a family.  But what Doctor Luce is denying is that a successful marriage is usually based on the ability of the couple to enjoy sex. Therefore, by feminizing Cal and making her unable to enjoy sex, I find it hard to believe that Cal could actually have a successful marriage in the future even if she had the “normal” look of a woman.

   We can clearly see that Doctor Luce strongly believes in social conventions. He separates the normal from the abnormal. Eugenides also shows us Dr Luce’s incompetency through his misinterpretation of the psychological tests given to Cal. Eugenides is trying to convince us that doctors are not gods but humans who are also subject to make mistakes.

       The same role of medicine in gender identity is seen in Serlin’s essay.  In this essay, the story of Jorgensen is narrated including all the criticisms that ensued from his decision to change his sex. It was very interesting to see how the whole media were interested in the matter as if it was a national concern while it was only about an individual’s decision which didn’t affect anyone. But according to several sources, Jorgensen’s action had betrayed the trust of the American public. According to a May 1953 Newsweek: “As an exposed illegitimate woman-and perhaps, more importantly, an illegitimate man-Christine’s secret had betrayed more than just the trust and goodwill of the American public.”

      I found it interesting how Jorgensen’s surgical transformation was associated to the civil war by the media. “Jorgensen’s surgical transformation may have seemed like the logical outcome of military service: It aligned her with the ways in which enfeebled soldiers were feminized, however temporarily, by their physical or mental activity. It was as if, by way of her conversion from agile manhood to fragile womanhood, Jorgensen stood symbolically for the vulnerable American male body besieged by a foreign power.”

     It was also surprising to see how Christine understood her change of sex as a religious conversion and resurrection. Although her action was frowned upon in the American society and undoubtedly in the religious community, yet to Christine, it wasn’t counter- religious. She used the same allegories used in Christianity to depict her action: “Jorgensen’s prose in these passages took on an almost spiritual dimension: representing her surgery as a type of religious conversion. Christine could describe her struggle as a triumph of spirit over flesh, wherein she chose to alter, through the miracle of modern science, the poor hand she had been dealt in life.”