Retrospective Sex: Rewriting Intersexuality in Jeffrey Eugenides's Middlesex

Abstract

This article examines the representation of intersexuality in Jeffrey Eugenides's Pulitzer Prize-winning 2002 novel Middlesex. It situates the depiction of intersexuality within the context of current scholarship on sexed identity within the field of gender and sexuality studies. It argues that while a fictional focus on ambiguously sexed identity might appear to be aligned with queer critiques of fixed categories of “sex,” Eugenides's narrative remains implicated in heteronormative assumptions. More specifically, it will explore the narrative strategies which frame Calliope Stephanides's intersexed body, focussing on the relationship between the male-identified adult Cal, “author” of this fictional autobiography, and his remembered teenage girl self. It will suggest that the retrospective logic at work in this narrative is complicit in a heteronormative temporality which reinforces the causal relationship between sex, gender and sexuality which queer theorists have sought to interrogate.

Fragmenting and defragmenting gender identity: An analysis of intersex gender identity performance in Jeffrey Eugenides Middlesex

“…Stephanie Hsu (2011, p.p. 87-88) branches from Shostak (2008) andCarroll's (2010) arguments in her discussion of Calliope's narration, arguing that Eugenides brings the intersex condition and narrative voice to the forefront of mainstream conversation through Calliope's refusal of corrective surgery as a hermaphrodite. Hsu (2011, p. 91) suggests that despite Calliope's performances conforming to heteronormative gender and sexology standards, bringing the depiction of Calliope's unstable gender identity as a focus of the novel and depicting the character refusing to be fixed by those who do conform to and reinforce the heteronormative standards allows for the intersex perspective to be heard without being completely abject.…”

OBSCURITY AND GENDER RESISTANCE IN PATRICIA DUNCKER'SJAMES MIRANDA BARRY

“…The text appears to affirm an origin of development – the incestuous relationship between Cal's grandparents – thereby offering a deterministic genetic reading of sexual dissidence. For Rachel Carroll (2010 : 190), this ‘narrative logic… serves to fix the indeterminacy of the intersexed identity by reference to a founding origin’, making the novel complicit with a linear and teleological heteronormative temporality.…”

La paradoja de la resistencia

“…Tal es el caso de las numerosas críticas que se han realizado, por ejemplo, en torno a las películas argentinas XXY (2007) de Lucía Puenzo, y El último verano de la Boyita (2009), de Julia Solomonof, 10 sobre si su argumento es o no biologicista; si se basan en las premisas biomédicas; si cumplen o no la función de informar sobre la cuestión intersex; si reflejan las demandas de la comunidad intersex o las coartan, entre otras aproximaciones. Lo mismo ocurre, por ejemplo, con la conocida y extensamente analizada historia de Herculine Barbin (2007) 11 , publicada por Michel Foucault, y más recientemente con la aquí citada Middlesex, que fue criticada, entre otras razones, porque la historia perpetuaría el discurso binomial de sexo y género o porque no respeta la terminología del activismo intersex (Carroll, 2009). …”