Sexuality and American Culture – Spring 2010

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 would cease to exist.  With both Humbert and Cal, the event supported by fate is not supported by society, not applauded or “supposed to” happen.  Yet fate comes together and it does happen. Read the rest of this entry »

Re: Middlesex 1/ 2

“… since the 18^th 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 of Calliope’s grandparents—Desdemona and Eleutherios, or “Lefty”—and to the provenance of their incestuous marriage. In a ostentatious house on the mountain is where the brother and his sister grew up—they played a variation of the popular rock, paper, scissors game—which could have nurtured Lefty’s gambling problem—explored the crevices of the mountain, and were involved with the handling of silk. They were, atop their little mountain in Asia Minor, isolated from the licentiousness of city life. Their only conduits to sexuality were each other and a magazine which “At night, when everyone was sleeping, her father used to take out of the bottom drawer of his desk”—whether or not this knowledge was acquired by spying, implying that Desdemona had caught her father masturbating (she would only be conscious of the act itself rather than the actual name, and taboo, of the act due to her ignorance in matters of sexuality), is only valid in assumptions. Lefty and Eleutherios grew up together as brother and sister—also as 3^rd cousins. From this magazine, Lingerie Parisienne, Desdemona would learn about the seductive qualities of dress as modeled by the women in the photos—she would teach her disciples Vicky and Lucille the disciplines of courtship.

Lefty had also discovered this spicy piece of literature at an early age. He would rub his private parts on immobile objects in search of “that feeling”—you know, “that feeling.” Eugenides writes, “Those ten sepia-toned photographs were what had started Lefty’s fascination with the city. But he had never entirely forgotten his first loves in Lingerie Parisienne. He could summon them in all his imagination at will.” Aside from this magazine, Lefty had his sister, who became his outlet for emotional equilibrium. They survived their adolescent trials and tribulations, including the death of their mother, with each other’s consolations. Lefty, motivated by his curiosity of yonder, puts on a suit, slicks his hair, and walks into the city to sleep with prostitutes, gamble away his cocoon wages and, in one instance, call out his sister’s name during sex with another woman.

Calliope introduces his/her grandparents to talk about the smuggling of that deformed fifth chromosome to America that would make it difficult for him/ her to select the appropriate restroom—that “one soldier who disobeyed, going AWOL…”

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?   Read the rest of this entry »

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.  There are also wardrobes, manners, sexualities, names, and expectations for only two genders.  This would be the big issue with raising Middlesex‘s Cal as an intersex child.  Despite scientific and historical findings, intersex individuals are unaccounted for and socially unacceptable.  So, within this constructivist frame parents and doctors who want a child to grow up uneventfully and “normally” will not risk this child’s comfort to put into question the method behind the two-gender madness.  Read the rest of this entry »

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 of gender and orientation (think Weeks, Norton, Luce & Co. — like a bad law firm); race; the murky field of female friendships; and taboo. Read the rest of this entry »

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 hermaphrodite from 19th Century France that Foucault discovered in Le Département Français de l’Hygiène Publique.  Please take a moment and look at these two pieces if you have time before next week’s class.

Article 1: Stuck in the Middle with You_ Inventing “Normal” for Sex and Gender

Article 2: Herculine Barbin – Foucault Introduction

Hi everyone, what a terrific group of posts!   It’s clear that you all have a strong handle on the play and its intricacies as well as it occasional weaknesses, so I think we can focus on significant scenes by having each of you prepare ones you want “staged” and then discuss it.  Collectively, you have highlighted a number of them but try picking 1 or 2 that you want to direct (and act in too).  This will be a mix of the seminar participation that I have been emphasizing lately with you each taking a teacher’s role and a means to do justice to the play, which should be acted out rather than simply read.  Some of you will, most likely, choose the same scene—and that would work out well time wise and also because most scenes involve a couple of characters.

Also, when you are explaining why you have chosen a certain scene, be sure to explain its context in relation to the documents and essays that you have written about so astutely in the posts.  Together, the play and the readings accent the themes of ethical and political deliberation amidst multiple power relations that we have been talking about all along, but perhaps here most directly. I’m looking forward to an exciting class. Lee

Weeks ago, we had touched on Foucault’s ideas of bio-power, but I feel it is only this week that these ideas are being played out, in primary sources and fiction.  The last time I talked about bio-power was in relation to WWI and the “Keeping Fit to Fight” campaigns that promoted safer sexual activity in order to prevent the spreading of venereal diseases.  However, the other agenda of these campaigns was to prevent soldiers from having sexual relations with “loose women,” who were thought to be the main carriers of disease, and preserving the family structure.  HIV/AIDS draws many social parallels, which Kathy Peiss points out in Major Problems: venereal diseases were “wages of sin” and AIDS was God punishing homosexuals (445).  Just as VD was a whore’s disease, AIDS was a gay disease. Read the rest of this entry »

Finding Angels in a World of Loss

The angelic prophecy has been revealed, and it has been rejected—by its own would-be prophet, Prior Walter.  The prophecy is to just stop: to stop moving and migrating and changing, and if that happens, maybe God will return.  Prior finds this prophecy a farce at best, dangerous at worse.  “We can’t just stop. We’re not rocks—progress, migration, motion is… modernity . . . Even if we go faster than we should. We can’t wait. And wait for what? God…” (Perestroika 132).  Such is the major theme of Angels in America, that by stopping and just waiting, nothing will change, nothing better occur.  It is a world where institutions, where greater authorities, cannot be trusted to affect change for the better, as they have failed: God, the greatest authority and institution of all, tired of the world eighty years prior, and has departed with no sign of return. Read the rest of this entry »

Joe the Mormon is as uncertain about his decision to move to Washington as he is about coming out of the closet. Perhaps these two things are linked, and if Joe to moves to Washington, leaving his wife in the process, it would mean coming out of the closet—the closet called marriage let’s say. He fears the label “Homosexual” and it is clear, from the beginning of part one to the end of part one, that he does not want to be branded. Drunk, He calls his mother and tells her, “I’m a homosexual”; disapprovingly, she does not respond to his confession, rather she scolds him about drinking alcohol—“Drinking is a sin!” His mother does not want to face the truth of having raised a gay son.

In these two excerpts from a tirade, Roy talks about labels: 1) “AIDS. Homosexual. Gay. Lesbian. You think these are names that tell you who someone sleeps with, but they don’t tell you that.” 2) “Homosexuals are men who know nobody and who nobody knows. Who have zero clout.”

Roy acknowledges the insignificance of a homosexual faction. He identifies them as a minority and that political positions transcend sexual orientation. To Roy the egomaniac, Power makes the individual. He doesn’t identify himself as a homosexual, because, he claims, he is too powerful. Labels, therefore, are oppressive; Roy says, “Homosexuals are men who know who in fifteen years cannot get a pissant antidiscrimination bill through City Council.”

His agoraphobic wife, who fears knife-wielding men in the bedroom, hallucinates on account of her intake of Valium. She is frequently visited by Mr. Lies, who tells her, when she begins to imagine the infinite possibilities of her imagination, “Even Hallucinations have laws.” And it is true that human freedom is bound by laws of all sorts, flying in from all directions like a sudden rainfall of swan corpses.