Sexuality and American Culture

Cal reflects on his experience with Dr. Luce:
I had miscalculated with Luce.  I thought after talking to me he would decide that I was normal and leave me alone.  But I was beginning to understand something about normality.  Normality wasn’t normal.  It couldn’t be.  If normality were normal, everybody could leave it alone.  They could sit back and let normality manifest itself.  But people— and especially doctors— had doubts about normality.  They weren’t sure normality was up to the job.  And so they felt inclined to give it a boost. (Eugenides 446)

And so they did.  Trends in medicine shift with the same frequency as trends in fashion. Cal realizes that not only is everything polarized into two categories: normal and abnormal, but that the terms are constantly shifting, expanding, shrinking.  Like all the other American consumer trends, even medicine appropriated and popularized certain qualities as normal and certain as abnormal.  It was Dr. Luce’s need, at that moment in his career, to fit Cal into his theory that blinded him to the facts of the case. 

The precise historical moment is relevant in more broad ways as well.  As Cal informs us, the Castro district in San Francisco is “a direct outcome of the military-industrial complex.”  When it comes to the case of Christene Jorgensen, Serlin points out that her “bizarre rise to stardom hardly seems consonant with the historical moment that nourished McCarthyism.”  However, Serlin continues, “Jorgensen’s biography…forces us to reconsider the ways in which the political economy of the Cold War exploited ideas about sexual orientation and gender identity to promote and disseminate American nationalism and domestic security” (Peiss 384-5).  This specific climate of suspicion also explains why the public was so quick to dismiss Jorgensen and regard her as traitor when they learned of her “inauthentic anatomy.”  For a brief while, Jorgensen was normalized and a prime example of a “real American women.”  But once the discovery was publicized in the heavily consumed rags of the time, instead of being a glamorized, normal girl (a great looking girl, no less), Jorgensen became a “medical oddity” to be scrutinized.  (We can also view Christene as a result of the military-industrial complex, after all, she was once a GI, and in “the ultimate civilian appropriation of military jargon,” Christene herself wrote of suffering in “the no-man’s land of sex” (387).)

Eugenides provides us with beautiful shots of American culture, particularly of the consumerism that exploded in the 50s (and has not stopped since).  Cal tells us that he can chart is life “in relation to the styling features of [his father’s] long line of Cadillacs.”  Milton traded cars each year as the rest of America, even (maybe especially) doctors, updated trends.  This is not an accusation, just a fact.  I do not blame doctors for constantly shifting their theories in pursuit of the right one, of the truth, specifically as they progress with new data, new technology, and new methods.  And it is an improvement upon the old world medicine, like that of Dr. Philobsian, which involves cursory examination and reliance on hackneyed practice.  But it is proof of our impressionableness. 

The image the public received of Christene Jorgensen was that which “journalism hoped to instill in its consumers” (387).  That is what the public was and remains: consumers.  We are told, on many different levels, from advertising to news, what is normal.  That “normal” shifts, as people feel inclined to continuously give it “that boost.”  What keeps us waiting for the new normal?  Our desire to fit in, which is evident from Cal’s happy realization: “I wasn’t the only one!”