http://www.intersexinitiative.org/popculture/middlesex-faq.html

1. http://www.intersexinitiative.org/popculture/middlesex-faq.htmlhttp://www.intersexinitiative.org/popculture/middlesex-faq.html

2. Discussion Questions • Silkworm as metaphor • Ethnic/immigrant and intersex: intersections? • Doubleness • Sexuality • Oprah book? • 69ers club and exploitation: the business of the body • A Man vs The Man (518)

3. Gender and Sexuality: Feminism to Queer Theory

4. Gender Studies: • Feminism

5. Feminisms • First Wave - rights • Second Wave - anti-essentialism, equality

6. Theories on Gender • Essentialism: argues that differences between men and women are natural (biology) • ‘Men are from Mars, women from Venus’ • Women are nurturers/emotional creatures

7. Radical Feminism • Mid-1960s Radical feminist groups: women’s liberation • Female revolution in consciousness • Personal is political • Collective action by women instead of individual responsibility • Analysis of love, marriage, sex, femininity

8. Foucault • French philosopher Michel Foucault (1926-1984) • Wrote The History of Sexuality. Vol. 1: The will to knowledge (1976) • Discourse (language/set of utterances) creates phenomena and therefore has power • Poststructuralist/postmodernist idea that discourse structures the way we see reality • Gender and sexuality are discursively constructed

9. Adrienne Rich Essay ‘Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence’ (1980) 􀂃 Heterosexuality is an institution forced upon women, predicated upon violence 􀂃 Women are socialized into ‘heteroreality’ 􀂃 Why is heterosexuality ‘natural’? 􀂃 Lesbianism has been written out of history 􀂃 Lesbianism is seen as abnormal

10. Critical Divides: Judith Butler's Body Theory and the Question of Disability by Ellen Samuel“…the Aristotelian assertion that “‘the female is as it were a deformed male' . . . not only does this definition of the female as a 'mutilated male' inform later depictions of woman as diminished man, but it also arranges somatic diversity into a hierarchy of value that assigns completeness to some bodies and deficiency to others’ (1997, 20). The notion that the disabled body stands in a similar relationship to the nondisabled body as the female does to the male has contributed, on the one hand, to the development of sexist medical models which pathologize female bodily functions such as pregnancy and menopause and exclude women from research studies, and on the other hand, to the de-masculinization of disabled men, who are then lumped together with women, children, and the elderly in the realm of abject and dependent bodies.

11. Lissa Paul • Feminism and Children’s Literature: Agency

12. Feminisms • First Wave - rights • Second Wave - anti-essentialism, equality • Womanism and Third-World Feminism - beyond gender, race, class, power • Third Wave - beyond gender, class, power • Neo-Marxist Materialist Feminisms • Queer Theory - Othered spaces, liminality, sexuality (at first)

13. Queer theory • Strategy of disruption of binaries (male/female; homo-/heterosexual) • Denaturalisation of categories • Against essentialism • Body ≠ Gender ≠ Desire (disconnected) • Postmodern

14. Judith Butler (Queer theorist) • Butler,Gender trouble (1990) • Gender is performative: gender is what you do, not what you are • Performances can be words or behaviour, done to us (midwife: ‘it’s a girl’) and by us (drag queen) • ‘It’s a girl!’: not a neutral description of a female identity, but a performative statement: it constitutes the sexed body

15. Judith Butler • Gender is socially constructed, but appears natural • Postmodernist because Butler does not believe in pre-existing core identities

16. Third way • Other theorists study the social construction of women’s sexuality and pay attention to bodily experiences: • Third Way

17. “The work of mestiza consciousness is to break down the subject-object duality that keeps her a prisoner and to show in the flesh and through the images in her work how duality is transcended” • Gloria Anzaldua Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987, 102)

18. Queer Theory • Homosexuality • Transsexuality • Intersexuality • Third Space (Chela Sandoval, third-world feminism)--both/and, transgression, ambiguity, borderlands, transformation, disruption, revision, reversal • Haraway's cyborg, a hybrid of machine and organism, challenges notions of purity, thereby resisting totalizing (coding) practices in a techno-scientific context. Specifically, her cyborg represents a third-space practice of recoding that blurs the boundaries between the technical and the organic.

19. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak explains that the term "Third World" was initially coined in 1955 by those emerging from the "old" world order: "the initial attempt in the Bandung Conference (1955) to establish a third way -- neither with the Eastern nor within the Western bloc -- in the world system, in response to the seemingly new world order established after the Second World War, was not accompanied by a commensurate intellectual effort. The only idioms deployed for the nurturing of this nascent Third World in the cultural field belonged then to positions emerging from resistance within the supposedly 'old' world order -- anti-imperialism, and/or nationalism" (270).

20. “The intersexed body clearly challenges conceptual categories. It therefore can serve, like drag, as a case study aimed at both stimulating and troubling theoretical attempts to account for the social construction of gender, especially the relations among gender, sexuality, and the body. But because real people also inhabit intersexed bodies, suffering the social consequences of their exclusion from normatively categorized identities, more is obviously at stake in thinking about intersexuality than theory itself, as scholars such as Anne Fausto Sterling, Alice Domurat Dreger, and Suzanne J. Kessler have been mindful. The potential challenge uncovered by the exploration of the intersexed body echoes a problem that recurs in such political criticisms as feminism: the act of description, with its concomitant act of theorizing, does not necessarily support activism in the world, a politics of social change that might alter the lives of those who live on the margins.”

21. "The book, like its hermaphroditic narrator, was meant to be a hybrid. Part third-person epic, part first-person coming-of-age tale" ("Eugenides" 76). • “Two narrative components of Middlesex-the immigrant family epic and the hermaphrodite's coming-of-age memoir-to attempt to bring into alignment the discourses of gender and ethnic identity.” • “Both rely upon the principle of a social imaginary, what Rosi Braidotti terms the ‘set of socially mediated practices that function as the anchoring point-albeit contingent-or framing and shaping the constitution of the subject and therefore for identity formation’ ("Becoming-Woman" 384).”

22. Origin of Love • Aristophanes’s Speech from Plato’s Symposium

23. Suzanne Kessler • “The Medical Construction of Gender: Case Management of Intersexed Infants,”Signs 16 (1990): 3-26

24. Anne Fausto-Sterling, developmental geneticist and professor of medical science at Brown • “The Five Sexes: Why Male and Female are not Enough” (The Sciences, 1993) • “For biologically speaking, there are many gradations running form female to male; and depending on how one calls the shots, one can argue that along that spectrum lie at least five sexes--and perhaps even more.” • Those born outside of the Platonic dimorphic mold are called intersexuals. • “herms,” “merms,” and “ferms”

25. Michel Foucault • Biopower • “the knowledge developed in biochemistry, embryology, endocrinology, psychology and surgery has enabled physicians to control the very sex of the human body.” • free people from pain of not being one or the other in a sex divided culture

26. Fausto-Sterling’s provocative yet slightly tongue-in-cheek position is to completely rethink gender. More seriously she would suggest that we at least rethink the medical and ethical principles of permanently “fixing” intersexuality in children, and to question our trust in gender as a reliable, fixed two-party binary. • “Success,” by the way, is often marked by living as a heterosexual and other gender normative assumptions.

27. “Sometimes people suggest to me, with not a little horror, that I am arguing for a pastel world in which androgyny reigns and men and women are boringly the same. In my vision, however, strong colors coexist with pastels. There are and will continue to be highly masculine people out there; it's just that some of them are women. And some of the most feminine people I know happen to be men.”

28. This kind of celebration and validation of difference, as it is manifested in body parts as well as bodily practices, underpins the ideology of what has come to be called Queer theory. Rather than focus on specific sexual acts or object-choices, queer theory affirms the diversity of the potential identities available to those marginalized and pathologized by normative models of heterosexuality.

29. In recent years, scholars in a variety of disciplines, from sociology to physics, have undertaken to challenge the longstanding, pervasive dichotomy between nature and culture. In disciplines devoted to the study of human beings, that dichotomy takes the form of a division between those aspects of our existence that are given at birth, and those that are shellacked onto us by the societies in which we live. The divergent scholars ["developmental systems theorists”] who challenge this dichotomy argue that its sharpness actually serves to distort, not clarify, our understanding of human development. In its place, some of these scholars have offered interpretations of the relation between nature and culture that attempt to show that the physical and the social aspects of human being are actually mutually constitutive, and are comprehensible only in relation to each other.”[D]evelopmental systems theorists…deny that there are fundamentally two kinds of processes: one guided by genes, hormones, and brain cells (that is, nature), the other by the environment, experience, learning, or inchoate social forces (that is, nurture)" (p. 25). Instead, systems theorists seek explanations that understand every process, every state, every entity as a complex interaction between so-called "natural" and so-called "cultural" elements.

30. This essay aims to complicate the picture by arguing for a queer reading of the Metamorphoses and the myth of Hermaphroditus and Salmacis, in particular. It will contend that Ovid’s myth provides an etiological narrative of complex sexual identity that originates in but transcends antiquity to provide a critique of what Judith Butler (2004, 65) has called the idealized gender dimorphism of the present day. This narrative speaks especially to the multiple, often overlapping identities assumed by the person who identifies as queer or as intersexual. The essay has a two-pronged trajectory: examining both how the later developments of feminist and queer theory informed by psychoanalysis have employed Ovidian myth within their own master narratives as they seek to understand the human subject; and using this body of theory as an interpretative lens for the myth itself, offering a reading that engages transformation as the vehicle of meaning for gender identity.