Brother/Sister, Husband/Wife The story that I’ve found most compelling about the first half of Middlesex is that of the narrator’s grandparents, Lefty and Desdemona. The tale of how their incestuous relationship arose is easily sympathized, their actions rendered justifiable by the circumstances from which they arose. After all, they were two siblings, orphaned while they […]
Incest, Middlesex, and Intersex Having only read the first two books of Middlesex, I feel this post must be about incest, a topic that Eugenides handles with incredible grace and tenderness.
More Than Something Gone Wrong: A Life Born of Fate Calliope Stephanides (of Middlesex) is much like Humbert (of Lolita) in his belief in fate. In both cases the narrators outline a series of events, down to small details, and highlight the fact that if any one of these things had happened differently their stories […]
Re: Middlesex 1/ 2 “… since the 18th century the family has become an obligatory locus of affects, feelings, love; that sexuality has it privileged point of deployment in the family; that for this reason sexuality is “incestuous” from the start.” – Michel Foucault The bigger half of part one is dedicated to the history […]
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 […]
One time, a professor told us about a series of ten confirmed genders that lie on a spectrum between “male” and “female.” This is per the scarce liberal arms of the scientia sexualis establishment. In the years since I acquired this information, I have hazily wondered why there are only restrooms designated for two genders. […]
Middlesex has got to be the best book to end our semester. Not only was it actually written fairly recently (to my great surprise; the author’s style made me think the book was written in the ’80s), but the book touches on so many topics we discussed: The pros and cons of scientia sexualis; constructs […]
Preparing for Middlesex Hi All, Attached are two readings that relate to Middlesex and might deepen our understanding of the novel’s subject matter. One is an article from the site www.rhrealitycheck.org about how we deal with cases of intersex children. The other is the introduction by Michel Foucault to Herculine Barbin, the memoirs of a […]
