Identity or Disorder
Though we had touched on the idea of identity in class before, I am happy that Jeffrey Eugenides’ Middlesex throws us right into it. The debate of inter-sexuality as an “identity or disorder”, as posed by the Shenker-Osorio article, is a question still relevant today, maybe even more-so. A person’s sexual identity defines them fully in the society we live in. It seems that gender roles define us and define how we function in society–especially if you’re Michel Foucault–but if you’re both, or one trapped in being the other, what role do you now serve to the rest of society?
We’ve talked about Foucault’s perspective that no inner self exists, but that we are socially constructed products of scientia sexualis. However, reading Eugenides’ first person narration through Calliope Stephanides gives a very different perspective, for how could Calliope be a socially constructed person? Eugenides asks what is innate and what is an effect of where we are raised, challenging Foucault’s notions. Calliope says “despite my androgenized brain, there’s an innate feminine circulatory in the story I have to tell”–a boy born as a girl and the experience of getting there (20).
Intersexuality is a defect in society–your parents or doctors choosing one sex or the other when you are born, despite the later repercussions of that, as seen through Calliope. However, Shenker-Osorio’s article brings up a good point about intersexuality as allowing for great possibilities of moving between the two genders. I again think back to Virginia Woolf’s quote that “it is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple; one must be woman-manly or man-womanly.” Clearly, Calliope experiences much difficulty in his life, but is also able to give a much broader perspective of the events in his life. He may be “innately feminine”, born a woman, but he’s “got a male brain” (19). The “fluidity”, as Shenker-Osorio refers to it, of inter-sexuality is what gives the narrative such a richness and challenges Foucault directly.
