Coincidentally, I have recently begun reading Middlesex, by Jeffrey Eugenides. The book is a sort of modern epic, a story about many generations of one family, told by a member of the family, an intersex person who is forty-one years old.
The story swtiches in and out of his life in the present (the time when he's narrating the story) and the past- he follows his grandparents as they travel to America from Turkey and relates their entire story and history to the mutations in their genes which remained silent until his (or, her, since he was born a "female") birth.
I am only about halfway done with the book and at this point the narrator, Calliope, is just about to hit puberty. She has lived her whole life as a girl and because her childhood was in the 50's when the medical community still knew very little about intersexuality, neither she nor her family nor her doctors have ever suspected her as being anything other than a completely normal XX female. The narrator obviously knows otherwise; he knows about his condition and explains that he is a 5-Alpha-Reductase Pseudohermaphrodite.
This is the first novel I've ever heard of with an intersex prtotagonist, and while I'm sure there are others, this is certainly the first novel to go mainstream (it won the Pulitzer a few years back). It seems odd that it takes a novel to characterize and humanize a hermaphrodite, but I imagine for many of the book's readers, this is certainly the case. I think, ultimately, the book is about asking questions about ourselves. Who are we? What are we? These are the questions that the narrator seeks to answer about himself. But I think the important part about his concern for the answers to these questions is that his sexuality really doesn't play as huge of a part as we'd expect it to. So, yes, his questions might be a little more difficult to answer than if non-intersex people were to ask them, but that doesn't mean that we shouldn't ask them. His struggle to find himself seems no harder than that of any teenager growing up.
Granted, this is a fictional novel, but I thought it was somewhat relevant to our class. Some of the videos seem to point out that maybe if we stop putting so much emphasis on gender identification, finding ourselves would be easier. The book seems to convey the other side of the argument. Adolescence is hard. Figuing out who you are is hard. But maybe we're reading too much into the importance of gender identification. Maybe classifying ourselves as one sex or the other plays no role in the task of finding ourselves and there is no way to gauge how difficult or easy it might be.
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3 comments:
That’s a really interesting point that you bring up about gender identification maybe being given too much importance in how we define ourselves. I think that it would be unrealistic to say that gender shouldn’t play any role in the identity we create for ourselves, but its importance perhaps reflects our society’s criteria of what characterizes an individual. Gender, ethnicity, profession—these are often the first bits of information that pretty much any generic form requests, because that is how our society classifies people, not by whether the person is a visionary or a pragmatist or a classic type A personality. The classification by occupation or sex may be useful at times, but when such categories become commonly used, it can assume an importance in self-characterization that did not exist before.
And the process of choosing the qualities to characterize a person can in itself tell a lot about a individual, just as it reveals a lot about a society. A person may identify herself as female; but that she defines herself by gender first and other characteristics second would make her very different from another woman who defines herself as a philosopher first and sees gender as less crucial to the list of what defines a person.
AmandaG, Thank you for bringing the book to our attention. Do you like the book?
I wonder how you think the Blackwood piece fits into your and saranya's final points about gender.
I do really like the book. I felt it was definitely slow in the beginning but, as a creative writing major, I'm really interested in new takes on writing or reviving and adding a new twist to old takes on writing (as is the case here with the modern epic.) I think Cal is a phenomenal narrator and his/her story is, obviously, really interesting.
In response to the Blackwood piece, I think it really supports both Saranya's and my belief that maybe in our culture we place too much importance on gender identification coinciding with biological sex. Clearly in these cultures, the being an XX female and identifying with the female gender (and the respective male characteristics) did not necessarily go hand in hand. The openness of these cultures to accept and even encourage people who they felt identified more with the opposite sex I think reflects how our own cultural stigmas really play a significant role in limiting people's beliefs regarding this topic and perhaps science shouldn't always dictate our beliefs about sex and gender.
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