In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Blackened Vulnerabilities and Intersex Mobility in Jeffrey Eugenides's Middlesex1
  • Kianna Middleton (bio)

Jeffrey Eugenides's Pulitzer Prize-winning epic novel Middlesex 2 achieved mainstream success due to its tender willingness to humanize the journey of an intersex child from the Midwestern United States. Appearing in post-9/11 popular culture, the novel's tale of perseverance and victory played well with a jarred national body. Though fictional, many readers concluded that Middlesex was Eugenides's autobiography. Meanwhile, his exploration of intersex, or disorders of sexual development (DSD), an "umbrella term for the myriad of characteristics of people born with sexual anatomies that various societies deem to be nonstandard,"3 offered mainstream readers new familiarity with the subject matter. Importantly, Middlesex was met with praise in the medical community. "Yes, it is fiction," Dr. Abraham Bergman, a pediatrician wrote of Middlesex, "but I cannot imagine a more authentic and sensitive voice…One way to sharpen our awareness is to listen to children's voices as they are expressed in books. In Middlesex, the voice is loud and clear."4 Additionally, Dr. Simon Fountain-Polley enthusiastically recommended the novel to parents of intersex children.5 Furthermore, literary critic Olivia Banner argues that the novel "helped ease the medical profession's transition from a policy of immediate surgical intervention to the acceptance of ambiguous genitalia"6 because of its recognizable, humanizing portrayal of inter-sex livability.

However powerful and clear Middlesex is in its representations of intersexuality, the novel is oriented toward white, able-bodied redress; therefore, other identities are characterized as sexual deficiencies and as cultural markers of stasis. Literary critics are apt to analyze Middlesex for its groundbreaking introduction of intersex people into the mainstream American readership, but I attest that the novel [End Page 30] also produces a troubling relationship between Blackness and disability. In this essay, I scrutinize Cal's childhood years as "Callie" in the 1960s, betwixt the steady decline of Detroit's industrial stronghold and the changing racial dynamics in the "Motor City" that culminate in the Detroit uprising of 1967. Adult Cal reflects on scenes from his childhood when he interacted with Black characters, before his subsequent teen years carried him away from Detroit, MI. Fundamentally, I argue that Middlesex analogizes both disability and Blackness so that Cal is able to follow his able-bodied destiny beyond sedimented and blackened identities and spaces more neatly.

The novel depicts the Stephanides, a Greek immigrant family with a history of incestuous relationships. Having fled from Turkey during the Greco-Turkey War, siblings Desdemona and Lefty immigrate to Detroit, Michigan in the 1920s and recast themselves as a married couple. The narrator, Cal Stephanides, formerly "Calliope" or "Callie" for short, is Desdemona and Lefty's grandchild. As an omniscient truth-teller, Cal traces his intersexuality to their consanguineous union and his inheritance of the Stephanides's tainted genes. Cal attributes the stigmatized character trait (the Stephanides's gene) to other sexually non-normative family members, including his parents, Milton and Tessie, who are also biological cousins. After a trip to the emergency room during his teenage years, Cal learns about his intersex diagnosis, 5-alpha-reductase deficiency (5-ARD); shortly thereafter, he decides to live as a man. The novel chronicles his medicalization through a discussion of encounters with Dr. Luce, the fictionalized characterization of Dr. John Money, who was the "principal architect of the dominant medical paradigm of intersex management."7

This essay offers a close reading of Middlesex, rooted in the representations of mobility, Blackness, and disability in a novel widely regarded for its intersex narrative. Like Black feminist disability scholar Sami Schalk, I also "read for the metaphoric and material meanings of (dis)ability as well as its intersectional relationship to other vectors of power which may be deployed in opposition to or conjunction with it."8 As part of a continued effort to challenge African American Studies and Disability Studies' difficult incorporation of each other and to offer Middlesex as a novel of importance in our interdisciplinary fields, my purpose is to destabilize common readings of Middlesex. Furthermore, I apply disability theory to the history of intersex medicalization, not to claim intersex as...

pdf

Share