Académique Documents
Professionnel Documents
Culture Documents
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Wood explains that hysterical realisms vitality consists in transcending the question of how somebody felt about something and explaining instead how the world works, a move he observes has the effect of
aligning certain examples of contemporary fiction with the tradition of the
social novel or protest novel (pars. 11, 7). In other words, hysterical realisms will to knowledge, to borrow another phrase from Foucault, seems
less interested in psychological narratives than in those discourses that
reside in or can be enacted upon the body and, by extension, the body politic. Because of the hyper-referentiality associated with this literary style,
achieved in this case by Cals encyclopedic digressions and running commentary, Eugenidess novel reflects the public culture of intersex visibility
during the final years of ISNAs operation. Yet Middlesex departs from the
conventions of the social novel by refusing to offer a representative type
of intersexed individual in its narrator; Cals substitution of medical opinion for personal opinion at the moment of intersex interpellation, followed
by his stated break from intersex activism, are in fact urgent reflections of
the increasingly post-identitarian society that the novel works to explain.
In her discussion of the enduring significance of race and ethnicity as
population markers that facilitate efficient forms of social control, Chow
establishes a further connection between post-identity and hysterical realism that is important to my argument. She restates biopower as the imperative to livean ideological mandate that henceforth gives justification to
even the most aggressive and oppressive mechanisms of interference and
control in the name of helping the human species increase its chances of
survival, of improving its conditions and quality of existence (7). While
intersex activism has historically corresponded to an effort to improve the
quality of life for individuals with mixed genital attributes, there is evidence that identity-based civil rights movements have become less effective at securing either legal victories or mainstream support for minority
causes.8 By portraying stealth as an alternative strategy for intersex survival, Eugenidess narrative in some sense heeds biopowers imperative
to focus on the optimal conditions for humanrather than a specific identity groupsexistence. Since stealth also bears racial implications in the
novel, however, this post-intersex formation additionally unfolds in the
context of a post-race scenario which, as Chow warns, may prove to be
even more oppressive than the strategic essentialism Cal associates with
identity politics. The arrival of the DSD diagnosis, another post-intersex
development representing a major shift in strategies of intersex survival,
therefore points to more than just the porous border between activist and
literary discourse on intersex. Historicizing this coincidence at the heart of
Middlesex also suggests that the hysterical bent of contemporary literary
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Cal, however, does not merely use hermaphrodite from time to time. In
fact, he expounds on the etymology of the word, weaves its origin myths
into his own plotlines, and pulls off a disavowal of intersex so total
that the term rarely even appears in mainstream reviews of Middlesex.
Nonetheless, the novels popularity had a major impact on intersex visibility in the years following its publication. When Middlesex was named
an official selection of Oprah Winfreys Book Club in 2007, for instance,
ISNA published a link to a For Oprah Viewers page on its own internet
Web site. An online reading guide at Oprah.com additionally parlayed the
novels controversial elements into polite conversation topics with pages
labeled, Go Greek! Recipes for Your Next Meeting, and a questionnaire
about gender behavior that asked readers, Have you wondered who you
really are? (Middlesex Reading Guide).9
After one of his public appearances was picketed by ISNA members,
Eugenides attempted to head off the growing controversy over his alleged
misuse of identity labels. Returning to the online forum for Oprahs Book
Club, he conceded that when speaking about living people, he would
try to use the word intersex, but when dealing with Greek mythology,
he wished to reserve the right to use the normative, historical term: hermaphrodite (Eugenides, Conversation par. 1). Protesters point out that
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foregrounding this mythic genealogy means perpetuating a form of recognition that has been identified as oppressive by intersexed people and as
scientifically inaccurate by a majority of medical professionals. Attempting
to distinguish living people from literary characters, Eugenides recasts this
impasse as a potential obstacle to his right to free speech and specifically
to the free expression of his own ethnicity. Rather than simply implying
that intersex concerns impinge upon Greek American interests, however,
Eugenidess invocation of rights discourse points to the absence of the
intersectional figure that is often occluded by the single-issue politics of
identityi.e. the intersexed ethnic, a subject position for which Cal is his
best proxy. Coupled with his earlier response, Eugenidess impassioned
defense of the ethnic artists license to his own cultural material rehearses
a familiar conundrum of identity politics: Is it possible, he asks, that the
subject who has been injured by a certain discourse is the only one authorized to reverse this discourse? Where the notion of free will meets the
logic of post-identity, a related question arises: Is identity, in fact, ever
optional?
To the crisis of narrative authority presented by such aspects of the
novels reception, Eugenides offers the concept of ethnic authenticity as a
solution. In other words, hermaphrodite acts like a stamp of authorial mastery upon the text, since the narrators intersex condition is coextensive
with the other social formation signified by this mythological figure: Cals
(and Eugenidess) Greekness. However, the appearance of Dr. Luces
clinical report in the novel complicates this view of ethnicity. The report
does not side with the available chromosomal and somatic evidence of
Callies maleness, but offers instead a profoundly social determination of
Callies femaleness. Because she has been raised as a girl in the Greek
Orthodox tradition, with its strongly sex-defined roles, the text confidently
prescribes medical intervention to maintain her gender identity; at the
same time, however, it worries that some aspect of her immigrant familys unsounded cultural difference may rise to challenge this diagnosis:
In general, the parents seem assimilationist and very all-American in
their outlook, but the presence of this deeper ethnic identity should not
be overlooked (436). In the reports wording, ethnicity reflects ambivalently on those scientific advancements in thinking about the behavioral or
psychosexual basis for gender identity that structure Dr. Luces work with
transsexual and intersexed patients. Because Callies ethnic gender in fact
precedes her genetic sex, her experience serves as proof that gender is a
malleable social construction for most of the novel. Her sudden rejection
of Dr. Luces diagnosis therefore represents the novels potential indictment of social constructivism, a notion that has defined the critical theory
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of the past several decades, and indicates its search for a different model
of identity formation.
What the depiction of ethnicity in Middlesex entailsancient gene
pools and endogamous kinship practices transplanted from foreign lands
and unleashed in modern timesturns out to be exactly where the gender trouble lies. Desdemona and Lefty, Cals grandparents, are siblings
engaged in an incestuous union, but their taboo relation is erased when
their processing interview at Ellis Island presents these two refugees with
an opportunity to improvise their identities and legalize their marriage.
Their secret is kept from the next generation, and Cals parents, Tessie and
Milton, marry without realizing they are in fact much closer than cousins.
The Stephanides family tree is partially reconstructed by Dr. Luce and
his colleagues during the brief time that Callie is under their care, however, and a transmission record of her special recessive gene is entered
into textbooks with titles such as Genetics and Heredity. This information about his every close and extended relative is accompanied, Cal tells
us in the opening sentences of the novel, by naked images of Callies
body, her eyes covered with a black rectangle after a practice of medical
photography that many intersex activists have compared to child pornography. The resemblance these pictures also bear to anatomical studies of
racialized populations subject to the colonial gaze offers another context
for Dr. Luces hypothesis about ethnicitys constitutive effects on sex: the
discourse of sexual perversity historically associated with racialized bodies echoes in his suspicion that Callies deeper ethnic identity might
furnish the motivation to pursue sexual pleasure beyond the borders of
normative gender.
In fact, ethnicity is the primary vehicle for exploring, domesticating, and ultimately naturalizing taboo forms of sexuality and gender in
nonnormative bodies in Middlesex. The Minotaur, for instance, serves
in Cals narrative to suture incest and the concept of genetic abnormality onto Greekness. While briefly employed in the Nation of Islams first
temple, Desdemona hears an indictment of her own incestuous coupling
in Minister W. D. Fards sermon about tricknology (154): in this origin
myth intended to demystify the roots of white supremacy, a figure named
Yacub creates yellow, red, and white people out of an original colony of
Black Muslims through the forced mating of ever lighter-skinned individuals. In addition to implicating the cruelties of racism, tricknology
directly names the narrative technology which, as in Fards fable, produces
biological or genetic explanations for the existence of social formations
like race or gender. By identifying with Yacub (even after Fard is revealed
to be a con man), Desdemona further underscores the texts ironic equa-
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Gender is cultural (489). Not unlike the doctors examination room banter, however, Zoras tokenizing of this aspect of surviving Navajo society
reflects the modern subjects fascination with vanishing cultures, and her
lesson about the cultural basis for gender echoes Dr. Luces medical opinion about the sex of rearing, which Callie has roundly rejected.
From the narrators perspective, the agreement between the medical establishment and the activist community regarding the difference
between sex and gender discredits the truth of Zoras simple proposition.
The fact that race and ethnicity are consistently invoked by both authorities to describe and interpret intersex phenomena also complicates the
dichotomy between essential and performative identities that the formula
sex is biological, gender is culturalseems to suggest. Zoras turn to
the ethnic authenticity of Navajo gender roles may express a more benign
sentiment than Dr. Luces suspicion of a deeper ethnic identity, but it
comes no closer to answering the question that is deferred in any symbolic
instrumentalization of intersex: whether intersex is biological or cultural.
Cal, on the other hand, has decided that his male biology is destiny and
the constructivist theory of social identity is a lie. This conflict between
characters is really a conflict between theories, indicating that sex and
gender are miscegenated categories within the novels social imaginary.
The clearest sign that Cal and Zora part ways on the subject of intersexs
origins, however, lies in the reason for Zoras commitment to activism:
Because were whats next, she replies when Cal questions her choice to
be out rather than stealth (490). In terms of narrative development, the
biological miscegenation that produces Cals intersexed body is a rehearsal
for the categorical miscegenation of ethnicity, race, and sexuality that produces his own stealth identity.
Real-world knowledge about intersex reflects this type of boundary
rupture between existing categories of social identity. Ethnicity is frequently correlated with mixed genital attributes in the evolving discourse
of intersex medicine.11 Ethnic subjects also have played the foil to intersexed subjects in identity-based rights activism. For instance, attention
to racial and ethnic difference formerly characterized ISNAs efforts to
build politicalor biopoliticalalliances over the issues of pathologizing
medical diagnoses and unwanted surgical intervention. One of the defining moments of ISNAs fifteen-year history is marked by the publication
of Chases essay, Cultural Practice or Reconstructive Surgery? U.S.
Genital Cutting, the Intersex Movement, and Medical Double Standards,
written in response to the 1996 federal Law to Ban Female Genital
Mutilation in the US.12 Here Chase argues that American doctors performing corrective or reconstructive surgeries on intersex infants should not
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be immune from prosecution under the new law, which could otherwise
be regarded as a purely symbolic denunciation of the controversial practice of female circumcision as it has been documented in more than thirty
African countries.
While her essay seems intended to introduce ISNAs work to a larger
readership concerned with womens rights and human rights, one of
Chases bolder claims is that the exclusion of intersex issues from the
scope of the legal ban on genital cutting perpetuates the shame and silencing of more than merely the US intersexed population. She writes:
Media and scholarly discourses on female genital mutilation, however, have
not engaged these [intersex] surgeries, instead serving up only representations
of African women. These discourses continue a long tradition of making
Africans into the other, suggesting that ethnocentrism is a key factor in the
sometimes purposeful maintenance of ignorance about contemporary U.S.
genital surgeries. (Cultural Practice 126)
The case for comparing this prohibited form of genital cutting with routine
intersex surgery is indeed compelling, since feminizing pediatric genital
surgery was openly labeled clitoridectomy by American doctors until
the end of the 1960s (Chase 132). Further, in medical literature from this
period, medical scholars frequently looked to sociological data gleaned
from observations of African tribes for evidence that the clitoris was
not essential for normal coitus (qtd. in Chase 132). Most intersex management, Chase states from personal experience, is a form of violence
based on a sexist devaluing of female pain and female sexuality: Doctors
consider the prospect of growing up male with a small penis to be a worse
alternative than living as a female without a clitoris, ovaries, or sexual
gratification (145). It may sound as if she has lifted a line from Dr. Luces
clinical report, but most surgeries on children with mixed genital attributes are in fact feminizing in intention because gender assignments at
birth are almost entirely dependent on penis size.13
Chases main point is to interrogate the representational logic that
seeks to distance female genital mutilation from feminizing pediatric
genital surgery as qualitatively different biopolitical programs aimed at
the optimization of certain forms of femininity and female life. Despite
emphasizing the [a]nalogous medical (rather than folk) operations performed on intersex people in the United States, however, she still comes
to the conclusion that ethnocentrism is an inherently negative form of
sociality that is a sometimes purposeful obstacle to intersex visibility
(Cultural Practice 140). The reason for this attitude toward ethnic difference can be traced to another double standard at work in her reasoning,
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for the analogy she draws between the medical and folk origins of genital
surgery also reflects an unspoken truth about the proximity between intersex and African genitalia in the American imagination. In other words,
the racialized or ethnic body in Chases scenario represents the repressed
knowledge behind the biometrics of normative gender assignments and
also constitutes an alternate genealogy for intersex phenomena in the firstworld context. This is why instead of curbing the type of biopolitical control represented by the discourse of female genital mutilation, Chases
redrawing of the population at risk for unwanted genital surgery is itself
a form of biopolitical management, according to Foucault. If intersex visibility alone can provide ethnic subjects with the fullest measure of freedom from the conditions of hyper-visibility that define them as objects of
an orientalizing gaze, as Chase argues, then intersex causes seem always
poised to take precedence over ethnocentric issues.
A text that stands to make its narrator the most famous hermaphrodite
in history (19), Middlesex can indeed claim the achievement of bringing
ethnicity to the center of an intersex visibility project which, as Chase
observes, may have been impeded by ethnocentrism from the start. Just
as ISNA eventually traded identity politics for the medical label of DSD,
however, Eugenidess novel exercises the biopolitics of intersex by trading narrative perspectives: Callies for Cals. A frequent interloper as a
child to Detroits Greektown, an ethnic enclave that borders an inner-city
African American community, Callie remembers street-corner dudes that
would sometimes lower their shades to wink, keen on getting a rise out of
the white girl in the backseat passing by; but years later when he returns
to the city looking phenotypically male, a defiant stare from a black man
on the street forces Cal to confess, I couldnt become a man without
becoming The Man. Even if I didnt want to (518).
In these related memories, The Man indicates the subject of the normative gaze and describes its vantage point from the passenger seat of a
moving car; in both cases, the narrators means of maintaining this prophylactic distance from Detroits racialized inhabitants is reflected in the radiating wheel-spokes design of the streets of Motor City itself. If becoming
a Detroiter means seeing everything in terms of black and white (156),
then the way that Cal also identifies with Berlina once-divided city
[that] reminds me of myself. My struggle for unification, for Einheit
seems at first to suggest the interchangeability of binary oppositions, (race
for gender). However, the forty-one-year-old speaker of the narrative also
declares, Coming from a city still cut in half by racial hatred, I feel hopeful here in Berlin (106). In the context of this synecdochal play, being cut
in half corresponds to the feminizing surgery that would have preserved
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nature or fate supplies the alibi for Callies unwilling transformation into
The Man, the sovereign subject whose abstract representational status
offers all the benefits of political membership without the burden of social
identity. Because Callie is sacrificed in the name of intersex survival, her
symbolic death is not registered as a loss; to the contrary, her narrative
effacement makes possible the state of disembodiment that Cal associates
with social privilege and putting on airs. His intersex normalization ultimately renders normal the distribution of narrative authority that consigns
Callies subjectivity to an interior position in the text and to a historical
past from which shewearing my skin like a loose robe (42)continues to ghost his frame narrative. His special biology therefore serves as a
rhetorical screen for his narrative choices. As Chow and other critics of
neoliberalism have observed, it is increasingly unthinkable that anyone
would freely choosein a world where freedom is both technologically
mediated and synonymous with consumer choicenot to live to the fullest extent that one is able. In order to apprehend the violence that lies
behind biopowers particular incitement to live, we must therefore look to
Julie, the ethnic female who inherits Callies position in the text.
Julies marginal role in Middlesex demonstrates the place of abjection
in what Chow calls the labor of producing the ethnic self (111). Easily
alienated from its mode of self-representation, the ethnic subject reproduces itself, Chow explains, in the ruling groups interest and for its profit;
thus, Julie depicts herself as an Asian chick and as the last stop on the
spectrum of normative sexuality. Her reading of Cal as a gay man in turn
activates a stereotype about submissive Asian sexuality which, in the pattern of gender inversion she mentions, reflects back the image of the intersexed body: Julie, like Callie, is a girl who looks and feels like a boy. It is
therefore significant that Cal and Julie first spot each other one morning at
a station on the Berlin subway where the train has stopped to conduct an
exchange of bodies (40). Indeed, in a lateral movement implying a similarity between these two US immigrant groups, the text has moved metonymically from the Asia Minor of Cals ancestors to the East Asia Julie
ambivalently represents as a Japanese American. However, this notion of
exchange also highlights an aspect of Julies ethnicization: associated with
her genetic Asianness is the threatening image of economic globalization
linked to the dominance of Asian marketsa threat reinforced by what
Japanese automobile manufacturing might mean, for instance, to someone who grows up in Detroit. While Cals minor Asianness is capable of
being assimilated into the postindustrial US landscape, Julies enduring
ethnic difference leads her to guess at the orientalist logic operating at
multiple levels in the text. In fact, her skepticism about Cals attraction
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to her reflects how routinely the feminine Asian body is called upon to
rehabilitate those embattled forms of American masculinity that Cal, for
one, embodies.
Julie is therefore a mirror for the indeterminacy of Cals bodily sex and,
more than the city of Berlin, her own expatriate body figures as the ultimate
terrain of his einheit or reunification. Their encounter also frames his narrative in a larger sense, because Cal defers the event of their sexual union
and, after a few promising dates, manages to avoid her for much of the
novel. Once he decides to drop his stealth persona with her, however, the
facticity of his biology assumes a new importance in the text. Explaining
his intersex condition, he says: What I told you about myself has nothing whatsoever to do with being gay or closeted. Ive always liked girls. I
liked girls when I was a girl (513). Although he is wary about conflating
his gender presentation with his sexuality, Cals attempt to map a stable
form of sexual desire onto his changing body nonetheless reproduces heterosexuality as a normative frame of reference for his life experience. The
version of intersex identity that he finally reveals to Julie depends on the
abjection of the lesbian potential preserved in Callie, whose liking for girls
forms a central preoccupation of Cals memoir. Submerged beneath the
presumably heterosexual orientation of Cals interracial relationship with
Julie is the shared construct of their ethnic femininity and, as suggested by
Julies own identification with boys bodies, the physical attributes commonly associated with this racialized embodiment of gender.
However, the racialized female genitalia which are genetically tied to
Julies body and which Dr. Luce offers to create for Callie constitute an
attribute that Cal feels does not belong to his own body. The ambivalence
underlying his attraction to Julie reflects what Chase implies in her analysis of African genital cutting practices: the presence of racialized genitalia
on white bodies ultimately functions as the sign of intersex identity in
the first-world context. The fact of their sexual compatibilityI might
be your last stop, too, Cal offers Julie as pillow-talk (514)reinforces
the notion that Cals intersexed body exists as the biometric standard for
Julies own. This sameness is what Julie avoids having to see when she
dims the bedroom light before they have sex for the first time; she then
deflects Cals inquiry into this gesture with an ironic retort about being a
shy, modest Oriental lady (513). Their mutual understanding depends on
the orientalist logic that structures knowledge production about the Wests
ethnic othersmost notably, Chow says, in the form of the ethnic subjects own self-knowledge (111). Julies awareness that she, too, might be
an intersexed ethnic constitutes the ground of her own abjection in Cals
narrative. Like Callie, she represents a form of queerness that must be dis-
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avowed so that his story may arrive at its normative conclusion. With Julie
at his side and Callie in his past, Cals status as The Man is secure.
Fulfilling the cultural role of the modern-day hermaphrodite, the effeminate Asian body is a product of the categorical miscegenation that not only
obscures any clear distinction between performative and essential identities, but also is responsible for fixing certain associations between racialized bodies and sexual or erotic practices regarded as ethnic in origin. The
queer potentiality of the Asian body thus configured is consistently undermined, however, by biopowers rationalizing discourse. From the fields of
global public health and genetic or genomic science, I draw two instructive
examples. In 1995, the World Health Organizations Global Programme
on AIDS published data on Regional or Ethnic Differences in Erect Penis
Size in connection to a report on condom procurement and distribution
worldwide: the data shows that the Asian men in the sample had the smallest erect penis size, confirming an enduring racialized assumption about
the Asian male body (World Health Organization).14 In 2003, a study by
a Japanese research team traced the occurrence of micropenis in a sample
of eighty-one Japanese men to a mutation on the 5-alpha-reductase-2 gene
(Sasaki et al)the same gene that has been linked to Cals intersex variation. According to the parameters of orientalism, the labor of producing
the ethnic self must keep pace with knowledge production about the ethnic
body; the ongoing discovery of what makes a body Asian, at least genetically, constitutes a biopolitical effort to determine the optimal conditions
for Asian life, but with the understanding that such a body could never
represent the normative subject.
A work of hysterical realism that invokes these multiple genealogies
of intersex, Middlesex explores the biopolitics of intersex by portraying
a stealth survival strategy as an alternative to an identity-based model of
intersexed experience. Although Cal finds opportunity to criticize ISNAs
strategic essentialism, the novels post-intersex ethos more accurately
reflects the organizations culture after 2006, when ISNA declared that
it would be using DSD in place of the term intersex in all future advocacy efforts. This unexpected announcement seemed to go directly against
the groups grassroots vision, and it was followed two years later by the
organizations dissolution.15 In May 2008, a farewell statement was put
up on ISNAs home page to commemorate its own scrappy, brave, and
confrontational beginnings and to explain that, despite ISNA leaderships
significant efforts to introduce intersex into the formula of LGBT identity,
[w]e have learned from listening to individuals and families dealing with
intersex that . . . intersexuality is primarily a problem of stigma and trauma,
not gender.16 Chase reportedly recanted her earlier activist writings with
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statements such as these: Its confusing to label a patients medical condition with a label that implies an agenda of radical social change, and
Label a medical condition, not an identity.17 She claims that as a practical handle for medical professionals, DSD represents the epitome of the
patient-centered medical approach that ISNA has advocated since the organizations inception. However, the groups latest focus on the stigma and
trauma that intersexed individuals and their families endure contradicts
the spirit of ISNAs earliest rallying cry: Hermaphrodites with Attitude!
Protest coming from other fronts of the intersex rights movement
reveals the far-reaching impact of ISNAs actions. The International
Intersex Organization (OII), a network of activists based in more than a
dozen countries, is a source of vocal opposition and states on its Web
site: Many people . . . feel that the DSD Consortium is typical of United
States imperialism and its abuse of power to define others and place them
in categories while they have no right to self-representation and definition
(Hinkle, sec. B).18 Inclusion in the DSM-V, a text used by psychiatrists
around the world to standardize the diagnoses of mental disorders, will
fortify the grounds for recognizing intersex variations as disabilities and
intersexed individuals as patients with medical needs rather than as political subjects with marginalized identities. While this implied pathologization of intersex has angered some activists, others have already conceptualized forms of solidarity with the disability rights movement and disability
culture.19 In fact, DSD proponents emphasize that the new diagnostic term
represents a good faith effort to become legible to a medical establishment from which most individuals in the intersex community could never
declare a total state of independence, as Cal manages to do in the novel.20
If Cal demonstrates that abandoning intersex identity politics can be
understood as an act of self-preservation or self-interestand therefore as
biopoliticalthen Julie illustrates biopowers uneven impact across social
formations and its unpredictable effects on ethnic discourse. As a concept
that mediates between older and newer technologies of the body, ethnicity
in the contemporary moment reflects the global division of labor around
the preservation and maintenance of certain kinds of biological life; in
this role, it is intimately tied to the culture of US imperialism, which OII
holds responsible for the reorganization of bodies and identities in the
wake of ISNAs dissolution. By dispensing with the need to claim intersex
as a marginalized identity, DSD affords individuals with mixed genital
attributes the seeming opportunity to redefine and reapply the biopolitical
imperative to maximize their life options. Yet this post-identity formation
may not be an option at all for the ethnic body defined by its own abjection.
The possibility, for instance, that a great number of Asian men around the
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world are potential candidates for intersex diagnosis and its related medical treatments seriously revises the stakes of the debate over DSD. Could
not this latest diagnosis, itself a symptom of categorical miscegenation, be
amended to read: Disorders of Sex and Ethnic or Racial Development?
Rather than shoring up the symbolic value or political efficacy of
intersex, Middlesex focuses precisely on this tangle of performative and
essentialized notions of identity by illustrating how race and ethnicity can
function as residual and emergent biometrics, respectively, for sex. The
predicted departure of intersex from the LGBT formula testifies to the
failure of this sexual identity formation to account for the racial and ethnic
genealogies of intersex. Indeed, the prevailing attitude in queer theory and
gender studies that sex [has] been gender all along specifically ignores
the ethnic bodys submerged connection to intersex in a relation that is less
hybrid, as the novel demonstrates, than catachrestic. The mainstreaming of
intersex stealth culture through Middlesex and, in a different but impending sense, through the DSM-V can be read in a way that brings attention
to the racialized and ethnic forms of life that are routinely abjected in the
transition from the politics of identity to post-identity. While the waning of identity in the field of intersex medicine has created opportunities
for rethinking the ontology of the intersexed subject, Eugenidess characters remind us that biopower consists precisely of the notion that politics
should remain secondary to the bodys biological imperative not just to
live, but to thrive. As the current discursive limit of both intersex medicine
and identity, ethnicity is poised to deliver this biopolitical messagebut
to which populations, it remains to be seen.
Notes
Thanks to Philip Brian Harper, Crystal Parikh, Ann Pellegrini, Cyrus R.K. Patell,
Michael Brub, Eden Osucha, Robert McRuer, and Martha Cutter for playing
critical roles in shaping this essay.
1. Efforts are currently underway to reclassify the chromosomal and somatic
conditions that constitute such attributes as Disorders of Sex Development
(DSD) in the upcoming fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of
Mental Disorders (DSM-V), published by the American Psychiatric Association.
Committees for the revision of the DSM-IV were formed in 1999, and the
American Psychiatric Association expects to publish the fifth edition in 2013.
2. The acronym frequently appears as LGBTIQ, where the additional letters represent intersexed and queer or questioning.
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3. Judith Butler complains of this tendency on the part of some scholars. In a 1999
preface to Gender Trouble, she also observes that her theory of gender performativity may not be directly transposable onto race (xvi).
4. Explaining the underdeveloped connection between racism and biopower in
Michel Foucaults work, Ann Laura Stoler observes that Foucault avoided the
issue of race and failed to place his history of Western bourgeois sexuality in its
proper context: eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European colonialism.
5. Callie is diagnosed with an intersex variation known as 5-alpha-reductase deficiency syndrome, where the deficiency in question lies in her bodys store of the
testosterone responsible for the fetal development of male external genitalia but
not internal genitalia, which remain unaffected by the condition. Callies body is
therefore phenotypically female at birth, but with the onset of puberty, it begins
to virilize.
6. As opposed to medical information, medicalized information is a term that
seeks to undermine the objective authority of medical discourse and gesture at
how patients seeking access to certain kinds of care may reproduce the diagnostic
results expected of them in an information feedback loop. See Sandy Stone for a
discussion of the medicalization of transgender and transsexual identities.
7. This criticism is similar to what is known colloquially as the butch flight
argument, which holds that male privilege automatically accrues to female-tomale transgender subjects and therefore provides an incentive to transition out
of a butch and/or lesbian identity. Cals intersex variation enacts this corporeal
fantasy of social privilege, and his late-developing masculinity also naturalizes
his phallic claim to the frame narrators role.
8. Janet E. Halley calls this growing resistance to progressive causes the result
of antidiscrimination fatigue on the part of the mainstream public (64). For a
discussion of post-identity strategies and legal disestablishment perspectives on
gender, in particular, see Paisley Currah, Richard M. Juang, and Shannon Price
Minter.
9. These statements were featured on the Oprahs Book Club Web page in the
summer of 2007, when Middlesex was the groups selection.
10. On the eve of her own elective surgery of getting her tubes tied, Desdemona
knowingly states her age to the doctor as eighty-four hundred years old the
exact span of time separating Yacubs mythical experiments in racial grafting
from Fards contemporary teachings (161, 155).
11. See, for example, Jill E. Emerick, Noelle Summers Larsen, and Andrew J.
Bauer.
12. This law was a rider to the Department of Defense Appropriations Act, Public
Law 104-208, passed on September 30, 1996. Hailed as a feminist victory, it specifies that anyone who knowingly circumcises, excises, or infibulates the whole or
any part of the labia majora or labia minora or clitoris of another person who has
not attained the age of eighteen years shall be fined under this title or imprisoned
not more than five years, or both (qtd. in Chase, Cultural Practice 126).
108
HSU
13. Cheryl Chase goes on to explain that a micropenis on an infant that is shorter
than an inch long will be cut back into a clitoris and, if necessary, a vaginoplasty
procedure will follow, becausein the words of an anonymous genital surgeon
You can make a hole, but you cant build a pole (qtd. in Chase, Cultural
Practice 131).
14. An appendix to the report on global condom use, this document compares selfreported information from four groups of menCaucasian/USA, African/
USA, Australia, and Thailandand draws on at least three different data sets
(including Alfred C. Kinseys original research) collected between 1938 and 1995
(World Health Organization). The issue of the reports validity or accuracy is less
significant to my argument than the fact that it bears the imprimatur of the WHO.
15. Chase reflects on the political origins of ISNA: I wanted ISNA to have a
different focus[to be] less willing to think of intersexuality as a pathology or
disability, more interested in challenging the medicalization of sexual difference entirely, and more interested in politicizing a pan-intersexual revolt across
the divisions of particular etiologies in order to destabilize the heteronormative
assumptions that underlie the violence directed at our bodies (Cultural 138).
Initially distancing itself from an existing network of support groups for individuals and their families dealing with particular etiologies of intersex like Turners
Syndrome or Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome, ISNA eventually took the lead in
building coalitions that united the interests of the intersex rights movement with
feminist causes and transgender issues alike.
16. The ISNA home page introduces ISNAs audience to a new non-profit organization, the Accord Alliance, which intends to work with federal and international
agencies to implement the change in medical terminology from intersex to DSD.
In a further sign of change, Chase uses her legal name, Bo Laurent, in her official
capacity as a member of the Accord Alliances inaugural Advisory Committee,
revealing Cheryl Chase to have been her pen name.
17. Chase reportedly distributed a pamphlet titled Why Change the Medical
Nomenclature? at the annual conference of the Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome
Support Group (AISSG-USA), held in Las Vegas in 2006. These quotations are
taken from this pamphlet.
18. OII is currently active in Argentina, Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada,
Colombia, Egypt, France, Germany, India, Israel, Kenya, New Zealand, Spain,
Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, Tunisia, Uganda, the United Kingdom, and the
US.
19. See, for instance, Emi Koyama. Departing from the civil rights-based model
of social progress, radical disability rights critique has tended not to reproduce a
politics of identity as usual. Instead, its goal is to de-pathologize the concept of
pathology itself in the face of an increasingly medicalized culture (Koyama par.
40); it therefore stands to revise an understanding of social disadvantage that has
as its premise an interrelated model of physical and civic perfectionthe healthy
body politic. For an example of a radical disability rights argument that accounts
for the role of race or ethnicity in the construction of the able body, see Eli Clare
(67-102).
BIOPOLITICS OF INTERSEX
109
20. Some intersex readers take specific issue with the appearance of normalcy
that Cals story of stealth survival entails. In her contribution to the OII website,
Sophie Siedlberg remarks specifically on the fallacy of Cals [r]eclaimed manhood, calling this fictional characters seamless transformation from girl to man
an urban myth in light of the treatable conditions typically associated with this
intersex variation, which can range from urological problems to questions of gender identity (pars. 9, 4).
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