Sexuality and American Culture 2011

Enjoy!

https://files.eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/1848/2011/05/15175046/finalessay.doc

Okay, I have so much work to be doing that I shouldn’t even be allowed to know that the internet exists, but this was too good not to share.

“I couldn’t imagine sitting there, smiling, and being honored by someone who would deny me the right to my civil, human, basic right to marry my partner and raise a family,” Vail said.

More info at http://www.pridesource.com/article.html?article=46900 and http://perezhilton.com/2011-05-10-students-walk-out-on-anti-gay-senators-commencement-speech

http://www.isna.org/files/xxxy.mov

Here is the video I mentioned in class.

Throughout my reading of Middlesex, I became increasingly interested in the tone of Cal’s narration during the passages he’s writing in present-tense (in Germany, with Julie, thinking about the past). It is during these passages that he touches on some of the more political aspects of his story – the parts that I’m most interested in right now. The introductions to two chapters in particular, “The Obscure Object” and “Flesh and Blood”, were riddled with questions, both posed by the narrator and implied/asked by the reader, some of which I’d like to tackle in this post.

“The Obscure Object” begins with Cal’s own stance against what I initially thought this novel would be: groundbreaking, liberating, courageous, compelling in it’s story of self-discovery and empowerment – all of those good things. In the end, I still think it was most of those things, but in a very different (and maybe more quiet) way. “Writing my story isn’t the courageous act of liberation I had hoped it would be. Writing is solitary, furtive, and I know all about those things. …Is it really my apolitical temperament that makes me keep my distance from the intersexual rights movement? Couldn’t it also be fear? Of standing up. Of becoming one of them.” Here Cal takes on – or at least posits the question as to why he is not more tied up in the intersex rights movement, despite having met some individuals in his life that were deeply interested in and knowledgeable of intersexual history, despite having seen the twisted obsession that some individuals have with intersex people, despite having seen and experienced the damage that such an obsession can have on one person.  Despite all this, Cal is afraid (or “wonders” if what he’s feeling could possibly be fear) to be an other – an official, card-carrying, registered-in-the-membership-files ‘other’.

The innocence and timidity that I recognized in Calliope as a young girl is still present, albeit in other forms, in Cal as a grown man. Or it could be that I’m interpreting Cal’s reserved tone and attitude incorrectly as timid, the difference being that one is aware of all of the implications of their own being and experience yet remained reserved, while the other may not understand the grandiose-ness (for lack of a better word) of their experience in the big picture of modern American society and the strange views we hold on gender and sexuality and everything else. Immediately after that paragraph, Cal notes, “Still, you can only do what you’re able.” It’s his reconciling of what I mentioned before: he’s not wildly rich or famous, knowledgeable or popular, a television star or a policy-maker. However, he is a writer, and by writing a novel on his family’s history and tumultuous relationship with desire and gender, he is doing what he is able.

The introduction to “Flesh and Blood” also caught my attention, for it’s discussion of discovery of self, by self, by others, through others, all of which led to Cal’s ‘current’ position, writing in Berlin. Discovering something about ones self is often times about confirming a gut feeling that you’ve already had about yourself, something you’ve already felt and not been able to name, such as Cal’s discovery that he is ‘genetically male’ in Luce’s file when the Doctor is out of the room. This is opposed to discovering something about someone else, which is often times more shocking, or the result of learning entirely new information about another person – for example, Cal’s learning that Lefty and Desdemona were siblings. This news is new to him and puts in perspective many, if not all, of the events of his life thus far.

I particularly enjoyed the discussion of how Cal’s family adjusted to his returning home as a son, not a daughter, as he had left. As I reached the end of the novel, I couldn’t forgot the following line in the intro to Flesh and Blood: “…the discovery by my parents of what kind of child they’d given birth to (answer: the same child, only different)” (361). It turns out that the most drastic thing that Cal’s mother and brother need to adjust to is his gender presentation, haircut, facial hair, physique, etc. “Confronted with the impossible, there was no option but to treat it as normal.” (516) This is Cal’s interpretation of his very first encounter with Chapter Eleven after he returns home – that there was no use having a long discussion about exactly what had happened, that the changes he’d made to his life were so drastic that it turned out to be easier for all to treat everything as ‘normal’.

Gradually, though, his language changes in reflecting this experience: “…it’s amazing what you can get used to. After I returned from San Francisco and started living as a male, my family found that, contrary to popular opinion, gender was not all that important. My change from girl to boy was far less dramatic than the distance anybody travels from infancy to adulthood. …Even now, though I live as a man I remain in essential ways Tessie’s daughter.” (520) Maybe this is the courageous, revolutionary, ground breaking part of the book that will be the requisite eye-opener for readers that may have come into the novel not understanding, accepting or appreciating the variety of experiences held by intersex individuals (or any gender-nonconforming individual). This book can hold it’s own in the canon of intersex literature not because it’s a book about changing the world and becoming a vocal proponent of intersex rights (it’s not) but because it accurately describes the confusion and process of simply beginning to understand ones own place within the larger spectrum of gender variant people, and that’s just as important to have published on the Best Seller List.

Reading about Christine Jorgensen’s transformation from male to female and Cal’s transformation from female to male highlights the superficiality of presenting one’s chosen gender identity to others. Presenting as male or female seems to be less dependent on the status of someone’s actual genitals, and much more on the kinds of cosmetic procedures they decide to subject themselves to.

“Sing, Muse, of Greek ladies and their battle against unsightly hair!” Cal commands. “The pains they took to make themselves smooth! The rashes the creams left! The futility of it all!” (308). The description of the mustache-waxing that follows is simultaneously hilarious and cringe-inducing. The inventory of beauty products on her bathroom counter at home is even more typically feminine. Similarly, Serlin describes Christine’s hair, dress, and jewelry and says, “We cannot reasonably dispute Jorgensen’s authority as a “woman” in these passages because she knew exactly how to present herself, both verbally and somatically, to ‘pass’ according to the presumed cultural terms of American womanhood” (390).

At the barber shop, Cal informs the reader, “The suit was only part of my new identity. It was the haircut that mattered most…My jaw looked squarer, broader, my neck thicker, with a bulge of Adam’s apple in the center. It was unquestionably a male face…By the time I came out of Ed’s Barbershop, I was a new creation” (445). Cal implements a new exercise regime (452) (the start of that layer of “armor” of “gym-built muscle” (107)?) and later talks about learning how to walk like a boy (“let your shoulders sway, not your hips” -441) and picking change from his pocket instead of his open palm (449). Can forging a new gender identity really be as simple as changing one’s hairstyle, clothing, and mannerisms?

Luce, would, of course, say yes. His conclusion is that Callie identifies female because she’s been raised that way. “But,” says Cal, “it’s not as simple as that” (479). Cal also rejects the idea that gender identity is encoded in our genes and evolutionary history and the related idea of “essentialism,” that somehow we are all intrinsically male or female. So, if neither nature nor nurture determines gender identity, what’s left? According to Cal, “a strange new possibility:” free will.

It’s an attractive idea, but I’m reluctant to dismiss the “nature” side of the debate so easily. Cal writes, “Unlike other so-called male pseudo-hermaphrodites who have been written about in the press, I never felt out of place being a girl” (479). To which I reply, “Yeah, right.” Books 3 and 4 of Middlesex, which chronicle Callie’s childhood and adolescence, are rife with examples of how she feels out of place. One will suffice: “I look back now…to see exactly what twelve-year-old Calliope was feeling…what comes back is only a bundle of emotions: envy, certainly, but also disdain. Inferiority and superiority at once. Above all, there was panic…[my classmates] seemed to be a different species” (297).

Callie felt uncomfortable as a girl, Cal still doesn’t “feel entirely at home among men” (479). Instead of using this as proof that negates both the nature and nurture theories, (as Cal does), I’m more inclined to see it as evidence that free will plays even less of a role in gender identity than we’d like to believe. Surely if Cal was truly free to create his own gender identity (haircut, clothes, mannerisms, etc.), he wouldn’t suffer from the ambivalence of constantly feeling not male (or female) enough. Instead, because in his case nature and nurture pulled in opposite directions, he’s destined to exist somewhere in the middle of the gender spectrum, rather than at the end of his choice.

Last class we talked about the prophet Tiresias, and how Hera cursed him with blindness after he revealed to Zeus that women enjoy sex 9 times more than men. Although the myth doesn’t explain why Hera was so angry, I have a theory based on “Why Women Always Take Advantage of Men,” a folktale retelling of Genesis in Mules and Men by Zora Neale Hurston. (Professor Quinby discusses the story in her book Anti-Apocalypse – you can read the original here: http://xroads.virginia.edu/~ma01/grand-jean/hurston/chapters/Chapter2.html#women)

Basically, the story says that man and woman were originally created equal, but the man went to God to ask for greater strength so “Ah kin whip dis ‘oman and make her mind.” God granted his request, and he went home and beat the woman. The woman goes to God, who tells her that there’s nothing he can do for her now- no matter how much strength he gives her, the man will always have more. The women then goes to the Devil with her problem, and he tells her to go back to God and get the three keys hanging by the mantelpiece.

According to the Devil, “See dese three keys? They got mo’ power in ’em than all de strength de man kin ever git if you handle ’em right. Now dis first big key is to de do’ of de kitchen, and you know a man always favors his stomach. Dis second one is de key to de bedroom and he don’t like to be shut out from dat neither and dis last key is de key to de cradle and he don’t want to be cut off from his generations at all. So now you take dese keys and go lock up everything and wait till he come to you. Then don’t you unlock nothin’ until he use his strength for yo’ benefit and yo’ desires.”

But, the power of the keys comes with a caveat: “Jus’ one mo’ thing: don’t go home braggin’ ’bout yo’ keys. jus’ lock up everything and say nothin’ until you git asked. And then don’t talk too much.”

The man tries to use his strength to break through the doors, fails, and then tries to bargain with the woman for the keys. The Devil tells her not to share: “So de woman wouldn’t trade wid ‘im and de man had to mortgage his strength to her to live. And dat’s why de man makes and de woman takes. You men is still braggin’ ’bout yo’ strength and de women is sittin’ on de keys and lettin’ you blow off till she git ready to put de bridle on you”

I think Tiresias telling Zeus how much women enjoy sex is equivalent to bragging about the keys. If men remain ignorant of women’s greater sexual pleasure, then they have no reason to think that women won’t follow the Devil’s advice not to “unlock nothin’ until he use his strength for yo’ benefit and yo’ desires.” Obviously that works to women’s advantage. If women are supposed to be able to “put de bridle” on men by controlling their access to sexual pleasure, a man who knows that women enjoy sex more can use that knowledge (to continue the key metaphor) to pick the lock on the bedroom door.

Or, as myth scholar Joseph Campbell writes, “I remember talking about this in a seminar one time, and in the interval between sessions, a woman came up to me and said, “I can tell you why Hera got angry…Because from now on she cannot say to Zeus, ‘I’m doing this for you, darling'” (Mythic Worlds, Modern Words 55).

I don’t remember where I saw this video (although it was probably Facebook) but I thought it was really effective and wanted to share it with the class.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h95-IL3C-Z8E&feature=player_embedded

From the Youtube info:
With “Not Ever, Rape Crisis Scotland has launched Scotlands first ever TV campaign aimed at tackling women-blaming attitudes to rape. “Not Ever” addresses women-blaming attitudes towards rape such as claims that dressing provocatively, being drunk or flirting with men are contributory factors. Its hard-hitting approach is intended to make people stop in their tracks, and to shake out and challenge ingrained prejudices many people have towards women who have been raped.

Re-reading Middlesex as I happen to be drowning in ideas about postmodern fiction (side effect of my thesis), I can’t help but focus on this novel as a challenge to traditional binary systems of understanding. Of course there’s the male/female binary, but there’s also nature/nurture, past/present, fact/fiction, etc. Which makes it ironic that Cal says, “Something you should understand: I’m not androgynous in the least.” Of course, he means the traditional understanding of androgyny: A term derived from the Greek words άνδρας (andras, meaning man) and γυνή (gyné, meaning woman) and refers to the mixing of masculine and feminine characteristics (wikipedia). Denials aside, Cal is androgynous in the traditional sense – Callie does not rise up  “like a childhood speech impediment” (41) and disappear, “leaving, shrinking, and melting away” (42), but is an essential part of Cal’s everyday life. “My gay-dar went off completely,” Julie says to Cal (184). Cal clearly isn’t as convincingly masculine as he’d like us to think. He compares himself to Berlin: “This once-divided city reminds me of myself. My struggle for unification” (106). Cal, struggling for “unification,” seems to be re-affirming the validity of the traditional gender binary by trying to fit into one of the two roles, rather than accepting his status as something else.

But Eugenides undermines Cal’s desire for unification by using him as a narrator that is nothing but androgynous (and here I’m using a looser definition, not strictly related to gender, but more of an overall mixing of characteristics): narrating in first person even though he doesn’t exist in the narrative yet, mixing historical facts with the fictional genealogy, interspersing details from the future in his account of past events, and slipping between present-day events in Berlin and the stories of Desdemona, Lefty, Milt and Tessie. So although Cal says “I happen not to be a political person,” Eugenides is definitely making a political statement about the value of a binary worldview.

Postmodernism rejects the idea of universal Truth, instead offering the possibility that “truth itself is always relative to the differing standpoints and predisposing intellectual frameworks of the judging subject” (from Postmodernism: A Very Short Introduction). In Middlesex, Eugenides reinforces this idea by having Cal, “dutifully oozing feminine glue,” realize that even “genealogies tell you nothing. Tessie knew who was related to whom but she had no idea who her own husband was, or what her in-laws were to each-other; the whole thing a fiction created in the lifeboat where my grandparents made up their lives” (72). This idea, echoed at the end of Book Two with a mention of Dr. Luce’s diagram of the Stephanides family tree, challenges Western scientia sexualis (the “interplay of truth and sex” (History of Sexuality 57)) in the same way Cal’s androgyny challenges the deployment of sexuality’s binary insistance on defining sexuality as normal vs. abnormal.

Desdemona’s shame comes from her incestuous relationship with Lefty, since incest is the “rule of rules” of “the grand and ancient system of alliance” (HoS 109). In the system of alliance, “hermaphrodites were criminals, or crime’s offspring, since their anatomical disposition, their very being, confounded the law that distinguished the sexes and prescribed their union” (HoS 38). But, just as incest in general is fundamental to “keep[ing] the deployment of sexuality coupled to the system of alliance” (HoS 113), the incest in Cal’s family frames his androgyny in the understanding that “sexuality had been, from the dawn of time, under the sway of law and right” (HoS 109-110).

If the deployment of sexuality and scientia sexualis have dismissed the idea that hermaphrodites are criminals, they have replaced it with the idea that hermaphroditism is a condition to be cured, (in Cal’s words, “unified”). About the intersex movement to end infant genital reconfiguration surgery, Cal says “The first step in that struggle is to convince the world – and pediatric endocrinologists in particular – that hermaphroditic genitals are not diseased” (106). Cal’s shame about his “peculiarities” (107) is a result of seeing himself as abnormal, as defined by the deployment of sexuality. Or, to quote Milt, “It’s science, Ma.” (6)

If Lolita was a novel that expanded our view of a “perverse” practice through the intimate diaries of the pedophilia Humbert Humbert, Middlesex obliterates our traditional understanding of the narrative to sexuality. Instead of merely presenting sexuality as an extension of a person’s identity, as proposed by Humbert’s pedophilia or Hester’s act of Adultery, Middlesex’s narrative is constructed in such a way that sexuality is at the core that perpetuates and generates all other themes and events. Sexuality becomes the origins of actions, the origin of religion, the origin of history, the origin of man, the continuation of life through evolution, all the way to the present day struggles of the humble narrator.

The image of the silk-worm is one that repeats through the book. From the very origins of silk, from Princess Si Ling-chi discovering it and keeping it secret until the smuggling of silkworm and mulberry leaf outside of China, the history of silk creates a profound emphasis on history. Instead of simply stating that her grandmother was one who was adept at cultivating silkworms, the narrator finds it necessary to emphasize even the most minute of details, as if recognizing that everything is connected. Everything is part of a web, and even the history of the silk worm itself: the smuggling out from China; the smuggling into America; using electric bulbs to trick the silk-worms from distinguishing from their old habitat acts as a metaphor and a foreshadowing to Des and Lefty trying to preserve their secret in their homeland; being smuggled onto the boat; reinventing their stories; finding sanctuary in a new home; and struggling to trick themselves (and in Des’s case pray for) a better future. The ongoing continuity suggests a way in which sexuality never changes; it merely is a permutation of the puzzle pieces, just like Lefty gambling through the 999 ways to find the “best” way to win. There is no right answer, just a different one where all the smallest changes will affect the outcome. Sexuality becomes a gamble with a life on the line, every action becoming important, every moment deciding.

A genealogical approach is utilized over and over in this book not only to examine the origins of Silk-worms but genetics and gene pools, the interlacing of families and incest, the infinitesimal affects of war, peace, and stagnation embodied by the oppression of the Turks and the fall of Detroit. The expansion of scope demonstrates that the book is not restricted to only a lifetime (Humbert in Lolita) or several centuries (Scarlet Letter with a Victorian twist) but to the very beginnings of time. The narrator Calliope alludes to her and her brother the “floating…since the world’s beginning on our raft of eggs…inside a transparent membrane, each slotted for his or her (in my case both) hour of birth” (198) as a reference to the extended continuity of events. As suggested before by the almost obsessive quality of providing context, Eugenides constructs Middlesex so that sexuality itself is firmly laced all the way back to the origins of the world. The religious undertone which accompanies this context—the creation of man—is exemplified in many different parallels which include Jimmy (Fard) “recreating” the older past of the tribe Shabazz to explain black superiority, or Calliope referencing preformation, The religious undertone in sexuality throughout the novel elevates sexuality into a divine act of creation. It then places a supreme responsibility on sexuality itself and all the ways in which it is intricately related to all other aspects in life, as the whole novel for the first two parts are the unraveling of which factors and events that are responsible for the narrator’s current sexual being.

Here’s an article I was sent by a friend which I think is interesting in terms of gender, culture, and global future:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/dailybeast/20110307/ts_dailybeast/12761_worldwidegendergapmeansmorebachelorsinasia

Thoughts?