Sexuality and American Culture

For this film I was inspired by a concept we discussed in class when reading The Scarlett Letter. This was the dynamic of the power triangle in which two men (in The Scarlett Letter it is Chillingworth and Dimmesdale) are brought close together because of their obsession with a woman. In Quicksilver Collides I reversed the genders involved in the triangle concept so that two women are united through their mutual love of a man. This is emphasized the most in Colby’s flashback where she retreats in her mind to the romance she had and the other woman’s hand comes across screen and intrudes upon her sacred moment. The woman is in her head. Colby does not take her anger out on the man but rather attempts to gain revenge through the other woman. Quicksilver is an element mentioned frequently in alchemical philosophy, personified as mischievous with transformative qualities. In this film the three characters come together and create an entirely new force. This force manifests itself through unjustified violence. The man gets rid of the two women in order to restore the delicate balance of his universe. He becomes the perverse adult within the deployment of sexuality and Colby personifies the hysterical woman. The church bells ring as an ironic gesture to highlight the injustice of what the man has done. He is not concerned with the rules of society that would normally confine him, because he can hide in his bathtub (unclean) and not face any consequences for what he has done. The process of shooting the film was intensified by the mood of the script. It was shot over 4 nights and a lot of time was spent creating atmosphere and chemistry between the characters. This wasn’t too difficult because they were all friends. The set design, particularly the bathroom, was meant to reflect the man’s egocentric and insane mind. The last element I put in the script was the idea of fate. The man does Tarot and the last shot is his fortune for the two women. It is left ambiguous as to whether he saw the card and decided to kill them or whether he was unaware of the card when he made his decision. Rather than take responsibility for his power he places it in the hands of an unseen higher power.

Volunteer Request: Sexual Violence Training Program

http://macaulay.cuny.edu/community/now/2013/05/volunteer-request-sexual-violence-training-program/

The New York Asian Women’s Center in partnership with the New York City Alliance Against Sexual Assault, and sponsored by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, will be conducting a training to build awareness of and change attitudes and responses to sexual assault among students in New York City college campuses.

Students will gain an increased knowledge about sexual assault as well as acquire concrete tools to engage community members in speaking out against all forms of sexual violence.  Students will need to be present in New York City from mid-June to early July for two-day training and a follow-up interview.

If you are interested please fill out the form below and email it to Gargi Padki at gpadki@nyawc.org. If you are unable to fill out the form now, just let Gargi know you are interested.

Call for Volunteers Form

This is a dance of undoing, unraveling the psychic and social knots we harbor around sexuality. This is a dance of liberation, the freedom to be fully human and the freedom to recognize all those who you encounter as something so much more than their roles, a dance where we discover each other as mutual subjects. This is a dance for Lee.

I will enact:

The Perverse Adult, the Malthusian Couple, the Masturbating Child, and the Hysterical Woman. A glum, tight businessman, and a Molotov-tossing anarchist.

All of these forms will be moved through and played out as gauze is torn off and belts unbuckled.

Some neologistic verbs to describe where it arrives: Cortexual. Helixuous. Intersubjective. At home.

Hey everybody,

I’m so sorry and disappointed to have missed everyone’s presentations this week. I was, and am only just beginning to recover, from being sick to the point of incapacitation. I’m sure it was an inspiring class session and I look forward, at least, to reading everyone’s work following the semester’s end.

I’m writing in preparation for my own presentation of my final project this week. For anyone who doesn’t know, I’ve been working on a Cabinet of Curiosities as an outlet to express identity. Without giving anything else away ahead of time I want to encourage anybody who feels so inclined to bring in an object, image, word, color, scent, fabric, machine, song, or toothpaste that reflects a current or previous perception of me. Don’t feel compelled to do it, only if something strikes you. It’s not imperative for my project, but I think it would make it more interesting because a lot of the thought behind my project is interactive, intersectional, etc.

Excited to see you all Tuesday, and missed you so!

Sophia

Cal’s riveting tale of transformation in Books III and IV of Middlesex is hardly contained to his imagined person. This transformation that Eugenides so deftly splices onto the page reverberates up through his fingertips into the the author himself, through the rods and cones of the reader as she deduces meaning, pattern, and emotion through the figurings of dark ink on the off-white sheet, out into the 3-dimensional world of modern America, that great ship playing militarist jingles as the world burns, and back in time to the shaking, shuddering desires of two siblings on the side of a mountain in Asia Minor.

When I first opened the book, I—like most readers, I imagine—carried along a presumption that it would be a sordid tale of a family’s malfeasance, leading, inevitably to the traumatic life of our 5-alpha reductase hero. And for much of the book’s earlier portion, as Cal stands off stage ‘in the green room’ of life, that vision can be maintained. But seeping through the silken cloth of shame is an understanding that will not flower in Cal’s mind till ze has turned the soil of his family’s past and exposed it to the sky: that life is unpredictable, and genes even more so. The one thing that we can control is our own capacity to love in spite of everything. Everybody, everybody, everybody makes mistakes, and while some keep whistling others face the music, divining a trans-human moral source that can forgive or begrudge good fortune to any person or family.

And from the beginning Callie has that power. Trained and enabled by the feminine coding that she receives from family and society, her empathy takes root from an early age: towards the disenfranchised mavros who share the block with her father’s restaurant; for her silent grandfather (/great uncle) and burdened grandmother; for the strange and dangerous house on Middlesex Drive, and, later, for her deluded father and wounded mother; her new set of possibilities as a man; from spritely and stark Julie Kikuchi. Cal’s transition has left hir (and gender-neutral pronoun coined in the decade since Middlesex’s release, it seems) with psychic and physical scars, there is no better balm than empathy.

Taboos are not broken by confrontation, nor are they negated by ignoring their presence. It is only through integration that what was once shrouded in darkness comes into the social fold. In Middlesex, we see all of the mechanisms through which society attempts to marginalize the Other (be it blacks, Greeks, women, or herms), and we see an inventory of strategies formulated in response (flight, fight, creation of new moral cosmologies like the Nation of Islam). As Foucault would be quick to point out, none of these binary tactics can do anything but shift the flow of power in its preset relation. By creating an archeology, genealogy, odyssey and mythology of hir existence, Cal creates a means for embrace of hir condition, and an acceptance of hir lot. Suddenly, Cal’s condition has a meaning, and a purpose, and a place. The broader the territory for love that we learn, the more that we can explore. As it was for the Greek heroes before us, a journey of transformation awaits.

It is a testament to the crude fascination of scientia sexualis that with such a novel case of gender identity, everyone was busy trying to collect and examine the physical details of Christine Jorgensen’s life. This is epitomized in Document 3’s text from a Time’s article:“The New York Post put the facts on the line. Reporter Alvin Davis, who flew to Denmark to interview Jorgensen’s doctors, established two main points: 1) Jorgensen’s case was not one of hermaphroditism or pseudohermaphroditism 2) in an attempt to accommodate his urge to transvestism, his Danish doctors had simply amputated penis an testes, left him a male castrate” (Peiss 375). The preoccupation with physicality and external reactions was typical of mainstream media and the medical world, though the medical world could take it further and ask more probing physical questions. But once America found out Christine was, (in their minds) a completely normal male, and then had actively decided to become a women (Serlin attributes America’s initial acceptance in part to Jorgensen’s excellent maintenance of an ambiguous front; her vagueness and cheeriness about her “previous state” put her in an ambiguous, and not strictly homosexual, category), they rejected her as a medical oddity and a homosexual. Read the rest of this entry »

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.

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Though viewed as a medical spectacle, hermaphrodites are more readily accepted into society than transsexuals.  Those born with mixed genitalia are regarded as having been born that way, destined by God to occupy a place on the fringes of mainstream society.  However, transsexuals are viewed in a harsher light, as critics claim that it is their choice to live as a member of the opposite gender, when they were born with perfectly “normal” (Peiss 375) apparatuses.  The borders between transsexuals and homosexuals blur, as traditionalists attempt to “cure” those “patients who actually want to be normal” (Ibid.).

Middlesex questions and attacks the notion of identity. It demonstrates how our sexual identity reaches far beyond so-called “orientation” and takes root in race, gender and family relations. The first half of the book closely follows the structure of a kinship alliance. Desdemona and Lefty demonstrate loyalty to their Greek heritage, perhaps Desdemona moreso than Lefty. Yet the same Greek village that would prevent Desdemona and Lefty from getting married and having children under normal circumstances somehow gives them free allegiance to do so. In being together they keep the Greek heritage more alive even as they assimilate in America. Once in America they stick close with family and in a curious phenomena that seems unique to their immigrant status, the Stephanides family has 3 generations living under one roof. Loyalty to family in this case is synonymous to loyalty to heritage. With each generation the Greek roots become increasingly shed for Americanization. Even in Desdemona there is a merging of Greek and American culture that morphs to become entirely its own with her soap opera fanaticism. In Calliope we see the Americanized teen and yet less so than her peers perhaps. There is a struggle early on for Cal to be normal and to strive to be like the Charm Bracelets and yet all the while there is a disgust for them. While Cal fluctuates between breaking with her Greek past and sticking with it (her brother is a great mirror for the break) her own identity becomes shaped and sets the stage for more confusion when the element of gender is added. Calliope has a self-identity and an image to maintain. She strives to be the beautiful, charming girl among the gazelles that are her classmates. The passage on page 312 is particularly telling as to how this manifests:

“Two pink Daisy razors stood upright…kissed a bottle of ‘Gee Your Hair Smells Terrific.’… a shaker of Love’s Baby Soft body power…two bottles of perfume…Max Factor eye makeup”

Overcompensation much? She is not developing like the other girls and doesn’t feel beautiful and thus she puts her effort into being as “womanly” as possible. Is this the same overcompensation that we see with the somehow very American façade of the Mercedes Benz, the suburban house, and the hot-dog company that characterize the Stephanides family? The exterior tells her that she is female and so she believes it is so. But what is the difference between a woman lusting after women, a man lusting after women or some combination of the two? There is a clear guilt factor with Calliope knowing that being a girl she shouldn’t fool around with girls. Calliope’s identity as a girl is swiftly swept away leaving her open to so many possibilities and yet utterly lost. What are the rules for a hermaphrodite? She identifies with the male side more and yet still feels both. Cal still appears to carry the guilt of his attractions that he developed in youth and this is evident by his hesitancy in romances. How has growing up “female” effected how he interacts with women? How has the lack of gender identity both freed and restricted Cal?

In last week’s class, Lee proposed a great question that we didn’t talk too much about, so I’ve decided to use it as the launch point for this week’s readings (particularly that of the last two books of Middlesex). The question was something along these lines: Is it important for an author to have an element of androgyny in his or her writing style? Eugenides obviously has a very androgynous style. He is able to portray Callie and Cal in distinctly feminine and masculine ways, respectively. In fact, while reading about Cal’s venture to California, I was actually able to sense a gradual shift in perspective from that of a female to a male. As Cal becomes more comfortable in his newfound manhood, the reader transitions with him.

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