Middlesex is a family saga told with an intricately constructed narrative, one that entwines a hazy, mythological past with a present heavy in scientific jargons, while attempting to overlay its homogenizing undertones with a seeming autonomy in life choices. The novel appears to account for the unconventional Bildungsroman of the intersexual protagonist Cal, who, after going through diasporic experiences and phases of self-discovery, eventually comes to terms with his body, identity, and descent, all of which are the natural outcome destined by the choices he made. However, reading the story from a Foucauldian approach exposes the truth that, ever since the start of the 19th century, governmental strategies directed at the population have been fundamentally biopolitical. A non-disciplinary power targeted at “man-as-living-being,” or to an extreme extent, at “man-as-species” (SMBD 242), biopower operates systematically by a complex ensemble of techniques that Foucault terms the “population-biological processes-regulatory mechanisms-State” series (250). This series of technology provides a critical lens for analyzing and shedding light upon the obscure aspects of life lived by Cal and other socially-estranged characters. Argued on a larger scale, the alienation of a certain population by the society and even the nation as a whole has also been similarly mentioned in Agamben’s Homo Sacer, which suggests an “inclusive exclusion” of bare life that forms the “constitutive outside” of the polis. Here, bare life is neither localizable nor literally situated on the edge of the city; rather, it is “fundamentally interior” to Western biopolitical governmentality (Vaughan-Williams 147; emphasis in original). An exemplary figure of bare life, the homo sacer “exists on a threshold that belongs neither to the world of the living nor to the world of the dead” (Homo Sacer 99), but as a living dead man, he is the corporeal embodiment of a biopolitical era built upon the watershed moment of modernity—
“the entry of zoe into the sphere of the polis” (4). That is, when zoe (“the simple fact of living”)
doi:10.6342/NTU201703931 39
is included into the polis only as a form of life to be excluded, bare life as a liminal political existence is thereby produced.
This politicization of zoe has produced, for Agamben, a list of figures of bare life including the Flamen Diale, one of the highest priests of ancient Rome; “the bandit”; “the Führer in the Third Reich”; Paul Rabinow’s case of Wilson, a biochemist who experimented on his own body and life; and Karen Quinlan, who remained in a ten-year persistent vegetative state until her death (Homo Sacer 182-86). In his interpretation of the term, David Vilaseca draws from Slavoj Žižek to extend the list of bare life and incorporate other beings such as terrorists, the Rwandans, Bosnians, and Afghans who receive humanitarian aids, the Sans Papiers in France, those living in favelas in Brazil, as well as African American ghettoes in the U.S. (180). Expanding the Agambian definition, Vilaseca proposes in Queer Events that bare life characterizes the condition of queers in contemporary post-permissive Western societies, asking how queer subjectivities can be symbolically represented by the figure of homo sacer (180). As he suggests, Lee Edelman’s magisterial work, No Future, announces the negative futurity of queers, for whom life under the politico-cultural sentiment at the time is, and will always be, dominated by disavowal and death. In line with Agamben and Edelman, Vilaseca argues that the figure of the queer personifies what is “included solely through its exclusion,”
and constantly exists as a variable to social structures of language, identity, and order;
furthermore, he explores the possibility of a queer people who would rather occupy the
“inassimilable ‘other side’” of structural systems than be incorporated into liberal citizenship.
For these reasons, the queer as an example of bare life serves as the contemporary homo sacer (180). By associating queer life with bare life—as both are subjected to processes of inclusion-exclusion, dispossession, and exposure, but nevertheless contain subversive possibilities—
Vilaseca has brought to light the dynamics of queer subjection/subversion underlying
doi:10.6342/NTU201703931 40
contemporary biopolitical regimes in which no individual is exempt from the threat of becoming bare.
When examined against the biopolitical take on queer life and bare life, problems concealed at the root of Middlesex are made all the more explicit: What kinds of population require enhanced regulation? To what extent can the subjects represent the figure of bare life?
How are they managed biopolitically, and through what mechanisms? In what ways does Middlesex deliver, or fail to deliver, promises of subversion? In light of these questions, this chapter will proceed by teasing out traces of descriptions in Middlesex, in which the life of certain population is coerced by biopolitical control and coaxed into self-regulation to opt for a legitimately proper life. This chapter is divided into two sections, each tackles a problematic aspect of the physical dimension of life. The first instance to be discussed is the biological intersexual body of Cal the protagonist. By examining the medical discourses and the sexual assignment surgery he fights against in the novel, this section proposes that Cal’s experiences are not singular events, but a general condition of the lives of intersexual people in North America. The second instance focuses on those strange, freakish, and monstrous bodies in the novel. Starting with Cal’s clinical revelation of the monstrosity of his sexually-ambiguous body and the freakish, performing bodies he encounters in the 69ers club, the section underscores the way these characters are excluded by biopolitical discourses. It deals with how the characters live with their bodies, how they subject themselves to a given biopolitical modality, as well as how they attempt to subvert power relations by playing on ambivalent responses elicited out of their own biological strangeness. To explore on a larger scale the regulatory controls that target sexual normalcy with the aid of self-corrective measures, this section begins by delving into Cal’s initial uneasiness towards his own desires, and how he later comes to terms with himself; moreover, other characters in the novel whose lives are certainly biopolitically improper will also be analyzed. The topics above—the intersexual body and the
doi:10.6342/NTU201703931 41
freakish bodies that are sexually and gender-deviant—seek to understand the workings of biopower through revealing the strategies used to manage the body and its biological desires.
With the looming presence of death over the pages, such as wars, mass killings, refugee deaths, and decrepitude, Middlesex has depicted a world in which humans as living beings or even species have no choice but to cling desperately to life.
Cal’s Intersexual Body
The book opens with a very biopolitical declaration. At the beginning of his life story, the autodiegetic narrator divulges, in a matter-of-factly tone replete with scientific terminology yet not without a gesture of poetic temperament, his physical birth and a metaphorical rebirth later in the Clinic: “I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974” (3). The narrator was born a girl named Calliope, but after a medical discovery designating her as an intersex, Calliope renames herself Cal. Recounting details of his life, Cal mentions how he has been “guinea-pigged” in Dr. Peter Luce’s study entitled “Gender Identity in 5-Alpha-Reductase Pseudohermaphrodites,” published in the Journal of Pediatric Endocrinology. Moreover, he is also photographed for Genetics and Heredity, in which he stood “naked beside a height chart with a black box covering [his] eyes”
(3). The apparent parallel drawn between Cal and his condition as an experimental specimen, or even a convict in a mug shot, implies a biopolitical scrutiny on the facticity of his nonconforming, intersexual body, a point that will be discussed in later paragraphs.
Being the omniscient author of his own life story (more specifically, his life and pre-life story, in which his self-consciousness dates way back to the origin of the mutated gene),
doi:10.6342/NTU201703931 42
Cal Stephanides recounts the biological and mythological process of his genetic coming-into-being:
Inside my mother, a billion sperm swim upstream, males in the lead. They carry not only instructions about eye color, height, nose shape, enzyme production, microphage resistance, but a story, too. Against a black background they swim, a long white silken thread spinning itself out. The thread began on a day two hundred and fifty years ago, when the biology gods, for their own amusement, monkeyed with a gene on a baby’s fifth chromosome. (210)
Two and a half centuries ago, with a divine twist done by the hands of “the biology gods,” a gene on the fifth chromosome is mutated, and from there it has to be passed down nine generations “until finally . . . on Greek Easter, 1959 . . . [t]he gene is about to meet its twin”
(210). As “sperm meets egg,” Cal’s life is about to begin. Interestingly, throughout the novel, the narrator exhibits a fixation on his genetic composition. At times, the intersex gene is both an epic achievement and an epic failure that Cal approaches from a distance, as he is often seen referring to the family genetic pool as “polluted”—“Sing now, O Muse, of the recessive mutation on my fifth chromosome! . . . Sing how it passed down through nine generations, gathering invisibly within the polluted pool of the Stephanides family” (4; emphasis added).
At times, Cal appears to identify himself with the gene, perceiving it not as one element among countless others that contribute to a part of his physicality, but as a token that alone suffices in representing and defining him. For instance, when Cal retells the event of his conception, he stresses especially on the genetic combination that distinguishes him from other countless possible selves, saying that the singularity of his self and body is the result of a particular recessive mutation. As Cal explains in the novel:
The timing of the thing had to be just so in order for me to become the person I am. Delay the act by an hour and you change the gene selection. . . . Not me but
doi:10.6342/NTU201703931 43
somebody like me might have been made that night. An infinite number of possible selves crowded the threshold. (11; emphasis added)
It seems that for Cal, his consciousness and identity are founded solely upon the gene, and the gene, in turn, is his unique marker of the self. This conflicting response towards his own body, which presents the tug between a blood that is polluted, and the fact that his very existence depends upon the defect, is manifested in the over-emphasis on his biological making. That is why Cal searches exhaustively for the origin of this genetic mutation in the Stephanides family tree, wherein the incestuous union of his grandparents, who are brother and sister, is shown to have been the main catalyst.10 By pinpointing the cause of his intersexuality in the randomness of divine will that occurred nine generations ago and its perpetuation in the familial guilt of inbreeding, Cal suggests that the condition of his body is his inherited original sin. As Carroll notes in Rereading Heterosexuality, this neat deduction of Cal’s intersexual state to a single genetic cause—a “roller-coaster ride of a single gene through time” (4)—not only demonstrates a certain branch of medical science, but also is “symptomatic of a narrative logic which serves to fix the indeterminacy of intersexed identity by reference to a founding origin” (Carroll, Rereading Heterosexuality 113). This anchoring of identity to a reductive account of the body, following Carroll, is presented in Middlesex by Cal’s genetic determinist approach to his own life, an approach that leads to his self-foreclosure of the possibilities for autonomous sexual desires and gender identities.
A middle-aged intersexual person living as a heterosexual male and working in the cultural division of the Amerika Haus in Berlin, Cal as a politically-correct cosmopolitan man is only biopolitically-incorrect in one aspect: beneath the macho pretensions of confidence, his former feminine self, Calliope, is still sharing a body with him. Cal’s most subversive feat
10 The Stephanides family tree is a diagram in Dr. Luce’s study on the “Autosomal Transmission of Recessive Traits” (198), which means that Cal’s genetic trait is the combination of two copies of a recessive allele he inherited from his grandparents Lefty and Desdemona.
doi:10.6342/NTU201703931 44
against normalization is undoubtedly his escape from Dr. Luce’s sexual assignment surgery, which took place after his “true sex” had been revealed due to an accident that occurred in Petoskey when he was 14 (at the time, he was still Calliope). On a summer day in Petoskey, Michigan, 1974, a tractor accident sent Calliope into an emergency room, and that was when she realized she was no longer an ordinary girl. Upon discovery of her intersexual body, Calliope was first taken to their family physician, the old Armenian Dr. Philobosian who failed to notice anything at her birth. Even when he had been acknowledged of the possibility of her ambiguous sex, he still “didn’t seem to want to know,” and freely “squirted out the antibacterial soap” after palpation as if to prevent contamination of any sort (403). Later in Dr. Peter Luce’s
“Sexual Disorders and Gender Identity Clinic” in New York, Calliope as well as the reader are gradually being informed of her physical condition amidst professional terms:
[Dr. Luce] had received the results of the endocrinological tests performed at Henry Ford Hospital, and so knew of my XY karyotype, my high plasma testosterone levels, and the absence in my blood of dihydrotestosterone. In other words, before even seeing me, Luce was able to make an educated guess that I was a male pseudohermaphrodite—genetically male but appearing otherwise, with 5-alpha-reductase deficiency syndrome. But that, according to Luce’s thinking, did not mean that I had a male gender identity . . . he couldn’t be sure until he had looked at a sample under a microscope. (413; emphasis added) Especially worth noting here are, first, the excessive use of medical jargons and, second, the obsessive preoccupation with sex and gender. As mentioned before, the narrative in Middlesex is surrounded by an aura of scientificity characterized by Cal’s habit of using medical jargons.
This phenomenon is in fact common among intersexual people, as Sharon E. Preves writes in
“Sexing the Intersexed,” those jargons are often used when intersexuals talk about experiences related to their bodies. They tend to speak of their “‘conditions’ or ‘endocrine disorders’”
doi:10.6342/NTU201703931 45
instead of using simpler terms, “reflect[ing] the widespread acceptance of a medical paradigm, which makes it difficult for lay persons to question medical opinion or authority” (532). In Middlesex, both the doctors as well as Cal tend to adopt abstruse terms when referring to any biological process or phenomenon. For the medical practitioners, it is a way to remain privileged and absolute in their diagnoses, yet for Cal and for other patients alike, the phenomenon only exposes their forced intake of jargons and utter dependence on medical authority.
In addition to overusing professional terms, the other practice to be problematized is the obsession over the assignment of sex and gender through medical interventions. Although genetically speaking, Calliope was born male, Dr. Luce insisted on conducting a psychological evaluation to determine her “prevailing gender” before performing an assignment surgery to
“correct” or “finish” her “not quite finished” genitals by making it the “right size” (433).
Ironically, Calliope tampered with the evaluation process by consciously submitting writings to Dr. Luce that demonstrated her heterosexuality (despite her homosexual involvement with the Obscure Object11). But after coming across Dr. Luce’s manuscript about her condition, she realized that rather than undergoing hormone injections and cosmetic surgeries that would make her look like a normal girl, she preferred the appearance of a man. Thus she left her parents a letter, signed her name “Callie” for the last time, and ran away from home. This entire incident, initiated by the surgery aimed at managing Cal’s ambiguous conditions, may well be representative of the intersex experience characterized by the push to medically construct an unambiguous body.
The 1950s United States saw the rise of postwar conservatism as well as the development of a new theory in psychology and psychiatry. John Money at Johns Hopkins presented a study on the necessity of conducting corrective genital surgery on intersexual
11 The Obscure Object is a girl who once engaged in a secret romantic relationship with Calliope.
doi:10.6342/NTU201703931 46
children, claiming that the surgery, if performed on the child patient at an early stage, would fix the ambiguous genitalia and thus rid the parents of confusion over the uncertainty of sex and gender. Consequently, Money believes, parents will then be able to ensure family stability for the successful psychosexual development of the child, and to prepare the child for his or her eventual assimilation into a society deeply divided by sex (Feder 89). Even though Cal, writing in 2002 at the age of forty-one, has successfully established a hyper-masculine appearance and is able to pass as a “normal” man as long as he remains closeted, he nevertheless feels shameful about his intersexual organ. In a passage in which Cal expresses the self-doubt and insecurity he faces towards building long-term relationships, he mentions how assignment surgery as a standard practice is the result of the pathologization of the intersexual body:
The intersex movement aims to put an end to infant genital reconfiguration surgery. The first step in that struggle is to convince the world—and pediatric endocrinologists in particular—that hermaphroditic genitals are not diseased.
One out of every two thousand babies is born with ambiguous genitalia. In the United States, with a population of two hundred and seventy-five million, that comes to one hundred and thirty-seven thousand intersexuals alive today.12
But we hermaphrodites are people like everybody else. (106; emphasis added)
Being a member of the Intersex Society of North America13 (although Cal himself notes that he has been apathetic towards intersex activism), Cal may just be one in tens of millions of
12 According to a recent article written by Alice Dreger (2017), an acclaimed scholar on intersexuality, around one in 2000 children in the world is born with intersex genitals. In 2017 U.S., at least one in 300 is born with a “difference of sex development (DSD)” that is visually discernible and may be subjected to early medical treatment.
13 The official website of ISNA states that the organization has closed down due to widespread
misconceptions regarding their positions. Starting in 2008, Accord Alliance has been operating in place of ISNA.
doi:10.6342/NTU201703931 47
unnamed intersexuals in the world, who are born in need of treatment and stigmatized should they refuse to be corrected.14
Medical intervention of intersexuality deploys a biopolitically-based rhetoric in order to build a rationale for the treatment, citing catchwords such as “normalcy” and “health” to warn unknowing parents against the dangers of not fixing the “sex errors” of the child’s
“sexually unfinished” body.15 One of the often-quoted surgical benefits is the promise of
“sexually unfinished” body.15 One of the often-quoted surgical benefits is the promise of