2010/05/21 by Olivia Banner · 1 citation
Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology · Medicine · #Race, Genetics, and Society #Reproductive Health and Technologies #Sexual Differentiation and Disorders
paper · doi:10.1086/651038
openalex publication_date 2010/05/21 · openalex created_date 2016/06/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/30
This article interrogates the role of genetic discourse in narratives of human sex variation, both scientific and cultural, by focusing on Jeffrey Eugenides’ bestselling novel Middlesex. The bildungsroman/fictional memoir of the intersexed Calliope/Cal, the novel describes its narrator’s transformation from a childhood lived as the girl Calliope to, when adolescence increases the masculinization of her secondary‐sex characteristics, an adulthood lived as the male Cal. In its beginning paragraphs, the novel both situates the gene as a rhetorical device and mobilizes a genetic explanation as the material cause of intersex. Then, as it documents Calliope/Cal’s two lives, the novel constructs sex as performative. In so doing, it would seem to disrupt conventional notions that lock sex down to a genetic, chromosomal makeup. Yet the repeated use of the genetic explanation contradicts and undermines its attempts to delineate genetic explanations as merely rhetorical and sex as performative. In addition, the novel ultimately contradicts the notion of sex as performative, for its always‐male narratorial voice enacts a heteromasculine normativity that instantiates the masculine subject of Enlightenment humanism.The novel’s immense popularity has been facilitated by its use of the heteromasculine voice. Also driving its popularity was its inability to uncouple intersex from genetics, a failure that points to the obduracy of the dual‐sex framework of genetic discourse. My analysis of reviews of the novel by pediatricians confirms that it was exactly the use of this framework that allowed for its uptake within pediatric circles. However, that the novel influenced pediatric endocrinologists to look at intersexed babies from a new standpoint suggests that we reassess the work of ideological critique when focusing on groups to which medical practice has heretofore denied identities. Finally, I ask what the novel might have to offer those working to dislodge genetic discourse from its adherence to a dual‐sex system.