Middlesex and Foucault

Re-reading Middlesex as I happen to be drowning in ideas about postmodern fiction (side effect of my thesis), I can’t help but focus on this novel as a challenge to traditional binary systems of understanding. Of course there’s the male/female binary, but there’s also nature/nurture, past/present, fact/fiction, etc. Which makes it ironic that Cal says, “Something you should understand: I’m not androgynous in the least.” Of course, he means the traditional understanding of androgyny: A term derived from the Greek words άνδρας (andras, meaning man) and γυνή (gyné, meaning woman) and refers to the mixing of masculine and feminine characteristics (wikipedia). Denials aside, Cal is androgynous in the traditional sense – Callie does not rise up  “like a childhood speech impediment” (41) and disappear, “leaving, shrinking, and melting away” (42), but is an essential part of Cal’s everyday life. “My gay-dar went off completely,” Julie says to Cal (184). Cal clearly isn’t as convincingly masculine as he’d like us to think. He compares himself to Berlin: “This once-divided city reminds me of myself. My struggle for unification” (106). Cal, struggling for “unification,” seems to be re-affirming the validity of the traditional gender binary by trying to fit into one of the two roles, rather than accepting his status as something else.

But Eugenides undermines Cal’s desire for unification by using him as a narrator that is nothing but androgynous (and here I’m using a looser definition, not strictly related to gender, but more of an overall mixing of characteristics): narrating in first person even though he doesn’t exist in the narrative yet, mixing historical facts with the fictional genealogy, interspersing details from the future in his account of past events, and slipping between present-day events in Berlin and the stories of Desdemona, Lefty, Milt and Tessie. So although Cal says “I happen not to be a political person,” Eugenides is definitely making a political statement about the value of a binary worldview.

Postmodernism rejects the idea of universal Truth, instead offering the possibility that “truth itself is always relative to the differing standpoints and predisposing intellectual frameworks of the judging subject” (from Postmodernism: A Very Short Introduction). In Middlesex, Eugenides reinforces this idea by having Cal, “dutifully oozing feminine glue,” realize that even “genealogies tell you nothing. Tessie knew who was related to whom but she had no idea who her own husband was, or what her in-laws were to each-other; the whole thing a fiction created in the lifeboat where my grandparents made up their lives” (72). This idea, echoed at the end of Book Two with a mention of Dr. Luce’s diagram of the Stephanides family tree, challenges Western scientia sexualis (the “interplay of truth and sex” (History of Sexuality 57)) in the same way Cal’s androgyny challenges the deployment of sexuality’s binary insistance on defining sexuality as normal vs. abnormal.

Desdemona’s shame comes from her incestuous relationship with Lefty, since incest is the “rule of rules” of “the grand and ancient system of alliance” (HoS 109). In the system of alliance, “hermaphrodites were criminals, or crime’s offspring, since their anatomical disposition, their very being, confounded the law that distinguished the sexes and prescribed their union” (HoS 38). But, just as incest in general is fundamental to “keep[ing] the deployment of sexuality coupled to the system of alliance” (HoS 113), the incest in Cal’s family frames his androgyny in the understanding that “sexuality had been, from the dawn of time, under the sway of law and right” (HoS 109-110).

If the deployment of sexuality and scientia sexualis have dismissed the idea that hermaphrodites are criminals, they have replaced it with the idea that hermaphroditism is a condition to be cured, (in Cal’s words, “unified”). About the intersex movement to end infant genital reconfiguration surgery, Cal says “The first step in that struggle is to convince the world – and pediatric endocrinologists in particular – that hermaphroditic genitals are not diseased” (106). Cal’s shame about his “peculiarities” (107) is a result of seeing himself as abnormal, as defined by the deployment of sexuality. Or, to quote Milt, “It’s science, Ma.” (6)

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 3rd, 2011 at 1:11 am and is filed under Ariana. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.