Needlework or a Ball Game: The conflation of sex and gender and the oversimplification of them both
Cal’s story traces the lines of her life through the well-trodden path of a young girl’s development, suddenly shifting towards the well-worn path of adolescent boys, but stops and hovers in the middle. He did not have to struggle to break gender boundaries. In a very real sense, it came naturally. Cal’s story is harder to tell because there is less precedent for it. His body requires another recitation of the story for every new person that sees it. Our bodies all have stories, but they are usually assumed before being told. We think we know vaguely what belongs where, what places you should or shouldn’t press. The ambiguity that Cal and Christine Jorgenson bring us back to is the ambiguity we all came into this world with. We are confronted with the unknowns when establishing our own sexual identity, or assessing another’s. These can usually be ignored by viewing them as symptoms of a variation of a culturally pre-established sexual identity, which we may pick like dolls from an “American Girl” catalog. In Christine’s case, it turned out that the theme she was a variation of was a homosexual transvestite man, not of a real American woman.
Serlin’s essay documents the way in which Christine Jorgenson’s story had been lauded and admired for six months, as it was framed in a normalizing light, taking advantage of the way her military romance fit in with current demand for nationalistic stories. Her rise and fall, led by politically-motivated efforts, extended the realm of normalization, rigid categorization, and Scientia Sexualis, into intersexuality. A new space in the bento box of Scientia Sexualis only appears when there is power behind it. Zora’s struggle for intersex acceptance draws its power from a wholly different place than Dr. Luce’s desire to study a new population of people with mutated fifth chromosomes, but the mechanisms by which they establish new entries in Scientia Sexualis’s catalog is the same.
Dr. Luce held Cal’s social cookie-cutter-ness in higher importance than Cal’s pleasure: “Though it is possible that the surgery may result in partial or total loss of erotosexual sensation, sexual pleasure is only one factor in a happy life. 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” (Eugenides 437).
One detail that caught my eye is in the definition of “eunich” in the dictionary that Cal referenced. The definition clearly defined a special place for eunich, before the definition for hermaphrodite referred to a monster. It referred to “one of those who were employed as harem attendants or functionaries in certain Oriental courts” (Eugenides 430). A harem attendant may not be the most glamorous of professions, but a court functionary might be. Later Zora describes to Cal the roles intersex people play in Navajo communties as artists, healers, and shaman. Zora’s hopeful “‘Because we’re what’s next'” (Eugenides 490) can be seen simply as a statement about the civil rights movement’s continuation into intersexuality. I prefer to see her statement, however, as a bold subversive attempt towards unity in a fractured landscape of sexualities. Cal writes, “We’re all made up of many parts, other halves. Not just me” (Eugenides 440). Taking intersexuality as a template for understanding all sexualities, we all might be unique variations on a pre-fetal theme.
Tags: Christine Jorgenson, intersex, Middlesex, Power
May 7th, 2013 at 2:00 pm
Zora’s statement of “Because we’re what’s next” resonates with Cal. Perhaps this comment, which communicates inclusion in the gendered identity of persecuted people, is what drives Cal to seek isolation. As the reader is told earlier in the book, Cal prefers to be viewed as an individual, rather than becoming involved with groups seeking social acceptance and equality. This exposure to Zora and her activism might have served as the trigger.