Sexuality and American Culture

David Harley Serlin poignantly makes the following statement about Christine Jorgensen with regards to the intricate relationship between public vs. private gender definitions and what Foucault describes as the confessional discourse operating within society:

Her physical conversion to a new body did not simply emulate the act of confession, but was the very act of confession: the creation of the authentic private body and authentic public identity that she had so eagerly sought from the very beginning. The surgery—like the letters she sent home, or like the perpetual exhibition of her femininity—was the material proof of Jorgensen's redemption for her former life as a man. . . . When Jorgensen had been identified as a “real” woman, it would have been unthinkable for media pundits to put her under any kind of scrutiny. Considering the decorum of 1950s public culture, which dictated what was proper or improper to discuss in the public sphere, to question Jorgensen's female authenticity openly would have been an inappropriate social transgression far too “indelicate” for a lady of Jorgensen's glamorous stature to endure. But when medical experts intervened to demystify the tenets of Jorgensen's putative “womanhood” for popular audiences, they exposed her as an “altered male”—and, later, a “morbid” transvestite. (Peiss, 391).

Above all, this statement shows just how complex the discourse of sexuality is, the vast number of functions it serves and the multiple levels of life and society upon which it operates. Serlin is affirming here that transsexual surgery is the ultimate form of confession, that it represents how effective the deployment of sexuality has been internalized by members of society. He refers to the internalization of “authentic” bodily and cultural definitions of gender, which are characterized and by a private-public dynamic. Furthermore, these definitions are flexible and serve different socio-political purposes. In other words, if the powers at be found it useful for the gender peculiarities of Christine Jorgensen to be viewed in a positive light, (for instance, as a “real woman” in promoting American nationalism), a whole system of femininity and glamor could be employed and disseminated through the media. If, however, the powers at be found it useful for the gender peculiarities of the very same person to be viewed in a negative light, Christine could be systematically redefined by medical and psychiatric authorities, “the media shaped her social identity to conform to the demonized status of other homosexuals, who were ceaselessly identified throughout the 1950s as a scourge against American family values, national security, and the moral hygiene of the body politic” (Peiss, 393).

In Middlesex, Eugenides allows the tension between private notions of the body and publicly institutionalized gender definitions to resonate through the character/narrator Cal. As a hermaphrodite, Cal has a body that does not conform to a socially regulated gender definition. After meeting with Dr. Luce for two weeks, he is urged to conform to the social gender definition under which he was raised—female—by undergoing hormonal treatment and surgery. The time Cal, (or at that time Calliope), spends at the “Sexual Disorders and Gender Identity Clinic” with Luce serves as a confessional dialogue through which Luce derives the truth of Cal's gender. The result of the confession is conflict. Cal rejects what is deemed to be professionally “true,” and runs away from his parents in search of his own truth.

I think it is safe to say that Cal never finds a socially regulated gender identity that is not met with tension by both his body, mental self, and how he is perceived. He adopts all of the characteristics, mannerisms, and peculiarities of being a man, but is never quite comfortable. He also expresses an inability to identify with others who feel similar tensions, “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” (Eugenides, 319). This highlights one of Marcella's points from two weeks ago that a community can be a source of alienation. Cal's adoption of a masculine identity also transformed how others perceived him:

When I was little, street-corner dudes . . . would sometimes lower their shades to wink, keen on getting a rise out of the white girl in the backseat passing by. But now the dude gave me a different look altogether. He didn't lower his sunglasses, but his mouth, his flared nostrils, and the tilt of his head communicated defiance and even hate. That was when I realized a shocking thing. I couldn't become a man without become The Man. Even if I didn't want to. (Eugenides, 518)

The truth he does find is of a different nature—it is a means of negotiating with tension and the absence of truth.