BORDER CROSSINGS: CULTURAL AND SEXED HYBRIDITY

Cal Stephanides, the narrator and protagonist of Middlesex, is a third-generation Greek American whose cultural heritage provides ample opportunities for the author to playfully evoke the mythological meanings of the figure of the hermaphrodite. Self-reflexive allusions to classical mythology abound in this ebulliently metafictional novel. Cal is conceived following her parents' return from a theatrical production of The Minotaur, studies Ovid's Metamorphoses at school and is cast as Tiresias in a student production of Antigone. Later, as a teenage runaway living amidst the sexual countercultures of San Francisco, he re-enacts the myth of Salmacis and Hermaphroditus for the titillation of the punters in Bob Presto's club, the Sixty Niners.Footnote ⁵ Cal is a diminutive for Calliope, the muse of heroic epic, and indeed the narrator claims, in a rather disingenuous apology, an epic status for his story: “Sorry if I get a little Homeric at times. That's genetic too.”Footnote ⁶ In this aside, cultural and genetic constructions of heritage and inheritance are humorously conflated. Indeed, parallels between the kinds of national, ethnic and racial border crossings which Cal's forebears undergo and the sexed and gendered border crossings which Cal encounters as an intersexed person are a recurring motif in this novel:

This analogy is not without precedent, as Judith Halberstam has noted in relation to transsexuality: “Myths of travel and border crossings are inevitable … But they are also laden with the histories of other identity negotiations, and they carry the burden of national and colonial discursive histories.”Footnote ⁷ The crossing of borders is, of course, not in itself a subversive act. Indeed, the Stephanides family's American story charts an assimilationist imperative which first challenges but then compounds racial and ethnic hierarchies. The fate of the family hot dog restaurant business – Hercules Hot Dogs – is instructive here. Located within an African American neighbourhood as a consequence of the segregationist effects of urban housing policy, it is the last white-owned business to be destroyed by fire during the 1967 “race riots” in Detroit. However, the subsequent insurance settlement enables the family to join the “white flight” from the city and only accelerates their economic and social mobility, such that Cal's parents are able to place her in a private girls' school and thereby evade the racial desegregation of the public school system. Middlesex Boulevard is the location of Cal's teenage family home. In this least desirable of the sought-after white neighbourhoods in Grosse Point, the Stephanides live happily alongside an orthodox Jewish family; both are subject to the “points system” by which real-estate agents police racial boundaries, but both enjoy the privileges of a hard-won, if somewhat provisional, “whiteness.” The complex, contradictory and contested nature of normative constructions of national and racial identity is embodied in Middlesex as a location. Similar tensions are at work in the narrative depiction of intersexed identity – the “middle sex” to which the title more punningly refers.

The conflation of cultural and sexed hybridity in the border-crossing analogy is reinforced when Cal reflects on his origins in this way: “I'm the descendant of a smuggling operation, too. Without their knowing, my grandparents, on their way to America, were each carrying a single mutated gene of the fifth chromosome” (71). His grandparents's passage not only allows them to undergo a transformation of national identity but also of familial identity; in 1912 they leave the burning shores of Smyrna brother and sister, to dock in America husband and wife. This union is itself implicated in ethnic and racial discourses given that it is attributed to, and implicitly explained by, the shortage of marriageable Greek women. Desdemona and Lefty's incestuous marriage is retrospectively identified by Cal as the genetic cause of his intersexed state. This deduction is not simply a reflection of one branch of medical opinion.Footnote ⁸ It is also symptomatic of a narrative logic which serves to fix the indeterminacy of intersexed identity by reference to a founding origin. Cal attributes his intersexed state to their consanguineous union – and so establishes genetic determinism as the driving force of his retrospective narrative, which is neatly reduced to the “rollercoaster ride of a single gene through time” (4). The generational narrative acts as a carrier for a genetic narrative, whereby Cal's identity is destined to be determined by the past; in this way his possible futures are foreclosed by an inheritance which is written into his genes:

In Middlesex, a theory of genetic inheritance – only one medical hypothesis among many seeking to explain the incidence of intersexed births – serves as the premise for a complex and compelling narrative strategy: one which rewrites what Cal “didn't know” into something “known all along.”

“FIRST ONE THING AND THEN THE OTHER”

The course of Cal's life story is anticipated in the opening of the novel:

This arresting, proleptic prelude to the action of the narrative correctly raises an anticipation that Cal's identity will be medically mediated. However, the process by which his identity is determined is much more protracted and ambiguous than is suggested in this narrative sleight of hand. By focussing on the process by which Cal “becomes” intersexed, I will explore how the retrospective logic at work in this narrative is complicit in a heteronormative temporality.

In his article “‘The Glans Opens Like a Book’: Writing and Reading the Intersexed Body,” Iain Morland writes, “Intersex bodies have genetic, hormonal, and anatomical configurations that cannot be adequately apprehended by hegemonic discourses of sexual difference.”Footnote ⁹ More specifically, these bodies confound the binary logic of sexed identity. The cultural and historical construction of gender has been compellingly demonstrated over the decades by feminist and gender theorists. More recently, queer theorists – and most prominently Judith Butler – have questioned the rhetorical manoeuvre by which this argument has sometimes been made, namely the differentiation of gender, as culturally mediated, from sex, as biologically fixed.Footnote ¹⁰ The cultural construction of “sex” is made all too apparent in the medical management of intersex bodies. Intersex theorists have noted how the birth of an intersexed infant is conventionally interpreted as presenting a “medical emergency”;Footnote ¹¹ the appearance of ambiguities in, or discrepancies between, genetic, hormonal and anatomical definitions of sex is deemed to warrant rapid and radical surgical intervention, even though the intersexed condition does not necessarily in and of itself pose a threat to the baby's immediate or even future health. Such interventions pose important ethical questions given that they constitute medically unnecessary cosmetic surgery on a subject unable to give consent, and given that such initial surgeries are often a prelude to lifelong medical interventions, whose side effects can include irreversibly impaired sexual function. Cheryl Chase is one of the most eloquent of theorists and activists who have articulated a critique of this practice: “Pediatric surgeries literalize what might otherwise be considered a theoretical operation: the attempted production of normatively sexed bodies and gendered subjects through constitutive acts of violence.”Footnote ¹² Indeed, advocates of intersex rights have made analogies between female genital mutilation (FGM) and what they term infant genital mutilation (IGM), some noting that while Western opposition to FGM sits comfortably within latent colonial assumptions, acceptance of IGM within Western medical practice reveals a very culturally entrenched commitment to normative constructions of sexed identity. The medical and surgical management of intersexed bodies is, then, a highly charged issue within intersex theory and activism. I will consider Cal's refusal of “corrective” surgery as a teenager in Eugenides's novel in this context and question the extent to which it can be aligned with a queer critique.Footnote ¹³

Intersexed conditions are various and the particular form which Eugenides fictionalizes offers specific narrative opportunities. Many intersexed conditions are apparent at birth in the form of ambiguous external genitalia. However, Cal is diagnosed as having a 5-Alpha-reductase deficiency, a condition in which an individual's genitals appear female at birth but undergo an apparent male-to-female transformation at puberty. A powerful motif in the life-writing of intersexed people is the discovery in later life of a hidden sexed history, in the form of surgery performed in infancy and concealed throughout childhood.Footnote ¹⁴ By contrast, Cal's condition enables Eugenides to construct a narrative in which intersexed identity is experienced within a temporal and teleological structure: as having a “before” and “after,” as departing from an origin to arrive at a given destination, as crossing a border upheld by a binary logic. Or as Cal puts it, in another knowingly classical reference, “Like Tiresias, I was first one thing and then the other” (3). This logic echoes the retrospective tendency which intersex theorists have discovered in conventional medical discourses of intersex. Its management is premised on the assumption that a true sexed identity does exist – and that it must be restored. This restitution narrative, as Dreger has described it (borrowing from Arthur Frank in The Wounded Storyteller), informs the terms by which patients, or more often their parents, are advised. Genitals are described as being “unfinished” or “incomplete” and surgery offered as simply finishing a process of development begun in the womb. Eugenides's narrative strategies share the paradoxical relationship to origin which Morland attributes to normalizing surgery, which “purports to reconstitute a sexed original which is somehow prior to the intersexed original, prior to the origin and arrival in the world of the human subject, the intersex individual.”Footnote ¹⁵

The third birth to which Cal alludes in the opening of the novel refers in one sense to his anticipated emergence as the author of a life history to rival its historical antecedents: “When this story goes out into the world, I may become the most famous hermaphrodite in history” (19). His aspiration towards authorship arguably has its roots in his interviews with Dr. Luce, the medical celebrity to whom Cal is referred following a routine emergency room examination. Dr. Luce is not only the founder of a Sexual Disorders and Gender Identity Clinic, but also the author of a column for Playboy magazine, headed “The Oracular Vulva,” in which the said organ is ventriloquized to respond to readers's enquiries and to offer some educational insights into erotic cultural history. Cal's case history is destined to become incorporated within the medical archive on which Luce founds his fame; Cal later identifies his anonymized body in one of Luce's publications: “That's me on page 578, standing naked beside a height chart with a black box covering my eyes” (3). However, Luce also invites the teenage Cal to write her own life history as an aid to his diagnosis. It is here that Cal's entanglements with the discourses of the normative – and his later struggle to become the author of his own life – become most tense. The autobiographical authority of Cal's teenage life history implicitly competes with the medical authority of Luce's case notes; however, it becomes evident that both authors falsify reality in order to preserve a culturally constructed “truth” of sex.

Unaware of the hypotheses which Luce is testing, but rightly fearing the kinds of intervention which the “wrong” response might prompt, Cal fakes her life. This faking is not without precedent – Cal is already adept at a ruse deployed to evade unwanted parental and professional scrutiny:

Cal's anxieties about the onset of menstruation, her dread of visiting a gynaecologist and exposing herself to his invasive examination and her self-consciousness in the presence of her more developed peers are recognizable features of “normal” pubescent girlhood, especially given that the onset of puberty is effectively a prelude to a lifetime of gendered scrutiny. However, in her self-authored life, Cal endeavours to convince Luce of the normality of her gendered identity by concealing the truth of her emotional life as a teenage girl; principally, she conceals her attraction to other girls and her sexual experiences with her female best friend. In this fictionalized autobiography, the adult Cal remembers her first foray into life-writing as derivative and inauthentic, but also, crucially, as performative in that it serves to produce an identity contingent on the needs of a specific moment:

This ploy is effective in that Luce is convinced of Cal's successful socialization as a girl. Luce studiously avoids gendered pronouns in his first interviews with Cal's parents, but now pronounces Cal their “daughter” and delivers his diagnosis; concealing the reality of Cal's intersexed body, he prescribes “corrective” surgery in order to align Cal's genitals with her gender.

Simultaneously with Luce's disclosure to Cal's parents, however, is Cal's discovery of Luce's case notes, which record the identification of undescended testes and a hypospadic penis, mistaken to date for a generous clitoris. The normative impulse at work in Luce's decision, and its potentially devastating effects for Cal as a sexual being, are made clear in the notes which Cal surreptitiously reads:

Cal's subterfuge – her attempt to pass as normal in a heteronormative culture – inadvertently licenses radical surgical intervention in the name of restoring normalcy, or rather its appearance. As Cal herself puts it:

It is at this point that Cal takes flight, leaving the clinic, his parents and his home to protect his bodily integrity. This is without doubt an act of defiance against the medical establishment and its management of intersexed bodies. But on another level Cal remains hostage to its discourses.

It is Luce's case notes and their record of genitals palpated and examined which forms the origin of Cal's newly sexed identity, rather than his own corporeal experience. Moreover, it is this medical history which inaugurates the retrospective logic which dominates the text we read. The adult Cal lays claim to an unequivocal maleness decreed by his hormonal constitution; in the earlier stages of the narrative, and in anticipation of events yet to unfold, he asserts, “To the extent that fetal hormones affect brain chemistry and histology, I've got a male brain. But I was raised a girl” (19). Retelling his life for his imagined avid reader, Cal rewrites his past desires as anticipating the male heterosexual destinations with which he later identifies. For example, remembering her locker room self-consciousness in the presence of a schoolgirl elite at her single-sex prep school, Cal reflects, “I look back now (as Dr. Luce urged me to do) to see exactly what twelve-year-old Calliope was feeling, watching the Charm Bracelets undress in steamy light. Was there a shiver of arousal in her?” (297). However, Cal's desires are placed firmly within a heterosexual matrix. Cal attributes her sexual attraction to girls to his belatedly discovered maleness in such a way as to infer a direct, causal link between sex and sexuality, one which seems to preclude, or at least refuse to acknowledge, the possibility of same-sex desire. And yet whereas this matrix posits sex as the origin of gender and sexuality, in Cal's narrative sex becomes the rhetorical effect of sexuality; her teenage sexual attraction to girls is retrospectively explained and legitimized by the discovery of his “true biological nature” (327). Hence the retrospective narration recuperates the same-sex desire which Cal feels as a teenage girl as a signifier of an incipient heterosexuality, which is then mobilized to authorize a sexed identity which follows rather than precedes his desires.

THE MIDDLE PART: ADOLESCENCE AND INDETERMINACY

The retrospective narrative strategies employed by Eugenides in Middlesex make it impossible for the reader to access Cal's experience as a teenage girl other than through the adult male Cal's self-consciously knowing hindsight; Cal's female adolescence is mediated by the adult Cal's conviction in his genetically sexed identity as male.Footnote ¹⁶ By revisiting Cal's adolescence as experienced by her as a girl I aim to recover the discontinuities of sex, gender and sexuality which the narrative seeks subsequently to contain.

Kenneth Millard has noted the ways in which contemporary fictions of adolescence situate formative experiences “in relation to historical contexts or points of origin by which individuals come to understand themselves as having been conditioned.”Footnote ¹⁷ In this way, adolescence is figured as subjectively experienced but historically determined; hence narratives of adolescence can become narratives of historical, and perhaps especially national, development. Middlesex could be read as exemplifying this trope, especially where sexed hybridity is interpreted as a metaphor for cultural hybridity and Cal's inbetweenness as a cipher for the immigrant experience. However, the emphasis on “points of origin” by which individuals “come to understand themselves as having been conditioned”Footnote ¹⁸ reveals a retrospective logic by which adolescent experience is subordinated to the adult identity which supplants it. In the context of an analysis of representations of adolescence and same-sex desire, Angus Gordon suggests that adolescence can be understood as the “the idea that a particular period of life is fundamentally structured by its transitionality and indeterminacy.”Footnote ¹⁹ Expressions of sexuality and desire which depart from heterosexual norms are normalized so long as the transition to adult heterosexuality is completed and the apparent “indeterminacy” resolved:

In her 1996 book on sexuality and narrative, Come As You Are, Judith Roof suggests that the middle part of the narrative is the structural location where lesbian identity is permitted to become visible, but only as a detour, a digression, a prelude to what follows: in her words, as “the pretext for the heteronormative's spectacular return.”Footnote ²¹ In a similar way I would suggest that Middlesex has a kind of middle part – dedicated to teenage girlhood – in which discontinuities of sex, gender and sexuality are given expression, but that, ironically, their possibilities are closed down rather than opened up at the point at which Cal becomes conscious of her intersexed identity. I aim to explore tensions between normative narrative tendencies and queer textual moments, by which I mean moments in which the binary logic of the heterosexual matrix begins to fold in on itself.

Exactly what occurs between Cal and her teenage female lover remains obscure in Middlesex; just as the object of Cal's passion strategically feigns unconsciousness at what her body is experiencing, so Eugenides draws a discreet narrative veil over the nature of her pleasure. While the desires which inspire these encounters raise questions for Cal about her sexuality, the acts which they prompt do not appear to raise questions about her sex. The elaborately euphemistic terms with which Cal describes her own sexual sensations is almost parodically evocative of the naturalizing metaphors by which female sexuality and feminine sensibility have traditionally been denoted: “For that spring, while the crocuses bloomed, while the headmistress checked on the daffodil bulbs in the flower beds, Calliope, too, felt something budding … A kind of crocus itself, just before flowering” (329). The association between sexuality and fertility, the reference to enfolded organic forms and the allusion to “blooming” and “flowering” conspire to suggest that female sexual arousal is integral to natural cycles of fertility, a process by which the female is made receptive to a reproductive destiny. However, this metaphor also allows for a significant indeterminacy with regard to its sexed referent:

While the “pushing” and “stirring” of Cal's “pink stem” could be placed within the lexicon of euphemisms for male sexual sensation, the crocus which can be both “soft and slippery” and “hard as a root” has qualities of both male and female genitals. Indeed, Cal admits that “I knew from personal experience that the Object had a crocus of her own. It swelled, too, when touched” (388); the crocus is here implicitly identified as, or at least with, the clitoris. The only difference relates to its size: “Mine was just bigger, more effusive in its feelings. My crocus wore its heart on its sleeve” (388); and elsewhere: “I worried at times that my crocus was too elaborate a bloom, not a common perennial but a hothouse flower, a hybrid named by its originator like a rose” (330).Footnote ²² Such an effusive bloom would seem to offer considerable potential in terms of sexual pleasure but Cal's adolescent sexual desires are principally played out in service to the pleasure of another; as Cal laconically concedes: “It was never my turn with the Object” (348). Cal's teenage lover is retrospectively named after Luis Buñuel's 1977 film That Obscure Object of Desire; this ruse is ostensibly to protect her identity but also evokes the way in which her own identity is obscured and objectified by Cal's obsession. Cal refers to her “crocus” as “An obscure object all her own” (329) and indeed the elusive and enigmatic object of her affections comes to stand for the indeterminacy of her genitals. However, an indeterminacy of agency and object is a recurring motif of Eugenides's depiction of teenage sexuality.

An unspoken pact develops between Cal and her friend, whereby the Obscure Object feigns unconsciousness as Cal acts out her desires when they share a companionable bed: “Sometimes when I climbed on top of the Object she would almost wake up. She would move to accommodate me, spreading her legs or throwing an arm around my back. She swam to the surface of consciousness before diving again” (386). The Obscure Object's passivity, assuming that is a form of unspoken consent, can be understood as a way of enjoying Cal's attentions while disavowing the implications of their intimacy: principally, the lesbian identity which it would seem to disclose. In terms of characterization, and from Cal's perspective, it also seems an extension of a narcissistic sense of entitlement integral to the Object's privileged class and racial identity as a wealthy white girl. In other ways, however, it could also be placed within the spectrum of normative female heterosexuality and indeed it is a role which Cal herself reluctantly plays when she finds herself cast in the sexual script pursued by the Obscure Object's brother, Jerome, and his friend Rex. Jerome strategically supports Rex's amorous ambitions with the Obscure Object, by engaging and disarming Cal as a companion whose presence might otherwise become an obstacle. Here Cal adopts a passivity which resembles that of the Object, but where the Object's passivity enables her to enjoy a sexual experience at odds with her nominally heterosexual identity, Cal's passivity enables her to endure a sexual experience compelled by the pressures of heteronormativity: “I didn't stop him. I remained completely still while he did his thing … Behind my impassive face my soul curled up into a ball, waiting until the unpleasantness was over” (373). Cal's behaviour is within the spectrum of normative female heterosexuality so long as female sexuality is assumed to be innately passive and male sexuality innately active; hence heterosexuality becomes something which men “do” to women. Equally, while Jerome is not forceful and certainly not violent, the distinction between consensual and coercive sex is uneasily blurred in this scene.

However, while reluctantly going through the motions of making out with her best friend's brother, Cal fantasizes about inhabiting the body of the Obscure Object's boyfriend Rex; here the boundaries between same-sex and heterosexual roles become blurred: “And then, because I suddenly knew that I could, I slipped into the body of Rex Reese. I entered him like a god so that it was me, and not Rex, who kissed her” (373). By assuming the fantasized agency of a heterosexual boy, Cal is able to legitimize her own desires for the Object, to make them meaningful and authentic in heteronormative terms. As Cal writes, “I saw [her breasts]; I touched them; and since it wasn't me who did this but Rex Reese I didn't have to feel guilty, didn't have to ask myself if I was having unnatural desires” (375). Just as the Obscure Object acts out a feminine sexual passivity as a way of normalizing her same-sex desires, here Cal acts out a masculine heterosexual activity in order to normalize her desires. It is at the moment at which Cal deduces that Jerome is “inside me” (375) – signified by “pain like a knife, pain like fire” (375) – that Cal experiences a revelation:

From the retrospective vantage point of the adult Cal, this remembered fantasy is enlisted to support his recuperative narrative, whereby a male sexed identity is discovered as the cause of a sexuality which is retroactively understood as heterosexual. Nevertheless, this is a rather queer textual moment. It is not so much the “entry” into her friend's body that is emphasized as the object of this exercise, as Cal's entry into the body of a boy. Moreover, Jerome's response, apparently so pivotal to her own revelation, is quickly revealed to be entirely her own projection: “Reader, believe this if you can: he hadn't noticed a thing” (376). Jerome's unknowingness might be attributed to his youthful inexperience or to a self-absorbed indifference to his partner's body; however, it is also suggestive of an indeterminate sexuality reminiscent, perhaps, of Cal's earliest erotic sensations playing in the swimming pool with her childhood friend Clementine: “I fall between her legs, I fall on top of her, we sink … and then we're twirling, spinning in the water, me on top, then her, then me … I'm not sure which hands are mine, which legs” (266). Hands and legs become interchangeable and agency blissfully blurred. Similarly, in Cal's encounters with the Object, “What pressed on our attention was that it was happening, sex was happening. That was the great fact. How it happened exactly, what went where was secondary” (386). What has not happened in any of these scenes is phallic penetration, an act assumed integral to normative definitions of heterosexuality; what these scenes imagine is a sexuality whose bodily encounters defy binary categorization and forms of sexual pleasure unencumbered by presumptions about “what goes where.” I would suggest that the adult Cal's much-lamented failure to establish enduring heterosexual relationships is attributable less to the fact of his intersexed body than to his own renunciation of the kinds of sexual indeterminacy which characterize the teenage Cal's desires.

CONCLUSION: THE LAST STOP

The generational family narrative has acted as a productive fictional holding frame within which to explore the cultural hybridity of histories and identities; while the family provides a model of historical inheritance and collective memory, its discontinuities – often acted out in motifs of infidelity, illegitimacy and estrangement – simultaneously subvert any aspirations towards a familial form of “grand narrative.” However, while a fictional genealogy may allow a space within which to foreground the historical and cultural contingencies of identity, in Middlesex it is arguably complicit with a heteronormative matrix within which queer contingencies of identity are contained. The heterosexual transgression which is posited as the cause of Cal's condition is normalized by structures of family and marriage, but Cal's body remains an anomalous “last stop” (184) in the family journey of the Stephanides, rather than the prelude to a differently conceived way of living.Footnote ²³

Despite his claim to an unequivocal maleness – “I operate as a man” (41) – the adult Cal lives what he calls a “closeted” (107) life, leaving the country of his birth and undertaking an itinerant career as a member of the Foreign Service as a means of escaping his body and its implications: “After college, I took a trip around the world. I tried to forget my body by keeping it in motion” (320). The narrative location of this retrospective life history is post-unification Berlin, where Cal works for the Foreign Service and lives amongst a Turkish Gastarbeiter community. If the parallel between sexed and cultural hybridity were to be pursued, this might seem a promising location from which to explore a post-sexed identity: “This once-divided city reminds me of myself. My struggle for unification, for Einheit. Coming from a city still cut in half by racial hatred, I feel hopeful here in Berlin” (106). Indeed, Cal's reference to “another birth” (3) in the opening of the novel might raise such an expectation. However, the indeterminacy of sexed, gendered and sexual identity suggested by the intersexed body – and played out in the “middle” part of the narrative – has been foreclosed by a persistent investment in binary categories of identity. The possibility of living a life beyond not only national but also sexed borders remains unimagined at the end of the novel, which proves unable to fulfil its own reproductive promise.