Within the Bounds of the Hetrosexual Imagination
Within the Bounds of the Heterosexual Imagination
I thought that Serlin’s essay Christine Jorgensen and the Cold War Closet drew some interesting parallels with Middlesex. Interestingly, the essay makes the assertion that Jorgensen was rejected by the general public after it was discovered that she was not a physical “hermaphrodite” who made the choice between the two sexes, but a man who chose to change his physical sex to become a woman. The rhetoric used by the media after they discovered that Jorgensen had not undergone surgery to construct female genitalia was condemning, they called her “‘not a hermaphrodite, not a pseudohermaphrodite, and not a female. The former George Jorgensen is a castrated male'” (Peiss, 392). Although Cal would scientifically be termed a hermaphrodite, he made the choice to live as a male, which would’ve been accepted according to the standards that are put forth in the essay.
Additionally, the essay discusses the fact that Jorgensen had a boyfriend that was also in the military. When Jorgensen was initially accepted as female by the media and American public, it was because as someone who had become a woman “she could be included within the bounds of the heterosexual imagination” (388). At one point during the latter half of Middlesex, Cal observes that he began to live as a man not because he particularly felt like a male, not because he was more comfortable with males, but because of his desire for women and his androgynously masculine physical appearance. (I lost the place in the book, so I can’t cite a specific page). In a way, Cal became a male to place his desire within the bounds of the heterosexual imagination, by becoming a man so that he could more freely be with women (in terms of society anyway, not in terms of his own hang-ups).
Tags: gender, hermaphrodite, heterosexual, homosexual, sex
