Gender Identity construction

Reading about Christine Jorgensen’s transformation from male to female and Cal’s transformation from female to male highlights the superficiality of presenting one’s chosen gender identity to others. Presenting as male or female seems to be less dependent on the status of someone’s actual genitals, and much more on the kinds of cosmetic procedures they decide to subject themselves to.

“Sing, Muse, of Greek ladies and their battle against unsightly hair!” Cal commands. “The pains they took to make themselves smooth! The rashes the creams left! The futility of it all!” (308). The description of the mustache-waxing that follows is simultaneously hilarious and cringe-inducing. The inventory of beauty products on her bathroom counter at home is even more typically feminine. Similarly, Serlin describes Christine’s hair, dress, and jewelry and says, “We cannot reasonably dispute Jorgensen’s authority as a “woman” in these passages because she knew exactly how to present herself, both verbally and somatically, to ‘pass’ according to the presumed cultural terms of American womanhood” (390).

At the barber shop, Cal informs the reader, “The suit was only part of my new identity. It was the haircut that mattered most…My jaw looked squarer, broader, my neck thicker, with a bulge of Adam’s apple in the center. It was unquestionably a male face…By the time I came out of Ed’s Barbershop, I was a new creation” (445). Cal implements a new exercise regime (452) (the start of that layer of “armor” of “gym-built muscle” (107)?) and later talks about learning how to walk like a boy (“let your shoulders sway, not your hips” -441) and picking change from his pocket instead of his open palm (449). Can forging a new gender identity really be as simple as changing one’s hairstyle, clothing, and mannerisms?

Luce, would, of course, say yes. His conclusion is that Callie identifies female because she’s been raised that way. “But,” says Cal, “it’s not as simple as that” (479). Cal also rejects the idea that gender identity is encoded in our genes and evolutionary history and the related idea of “essentialism,” that somehow we are all intrinsically male or female. So, if neither nature nor nurture determines gender identity, what’s left? According to Cal, “a strange new possibility:” free will.

It’s an attractive idea, but I’m reluctant to dismiss the “nature” side of the debate so easily. Cal writes, “Unlike other so-called male pseudo-hermaphrodites who have been written about in the press, I never felt out of place being a girl” (479). To which I reply, “Yeah, right.” Books 3 and 4 of Middlesex, which chronicle Callie’s childhood and adolescence, are rife with examples of how she feels out of place. One will suffice: “I look back now…to see exactly what twelve-year-old Calliope was feeling…what comes back is only a bundle of emotions: envy, certainly, but also disdain. Inferiority and superiority at once. Above all, there was panic…[my classmates] seemed to be a different species” (297).

Callie felt uncomfortable as a girl, Cal still doesn’t “feel entirely at home among men” (479). Instead of using this as proof that negates both the nature and nurture theories, (as Cal does), I’m more inclined to see it as evidence that free will plays even less of a role in gender identity than we’d like to believe. Surely if Cal was truly free to create his own gender identity (haircut, clothes, mannerisms, etc.), he wouldn’t suffer from the ambivalence of constantly feeling not male (or female) enough. Instead, because in his case nature and nurture pulled in opposite directions, he’s destined to exist somewhere in the middle of the gender spectrum, rather than at the end of his choice.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 6th, 2011 at 11:26 pm 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.