Ethnicity and the Biopolitics of Intersex in

Jeffrey Eugenides’s Middlesex

Stephanie Hsu
Pace University

In Middlesex (2003), Jeffrey Eugenides relies on the familiar model of

the US immigration narrative to introduce an international readership to the
decidedly unfamiliar voice of a narrator who is a “hermaphrodite.” As par-
allel emplotments, Cal (whose female self is known as Calliope or Callie)
Stephanides’s accounts of his family’s immigration history and his gender
transition suggest that the successful assimilation of the ethnic subject into
the American middle class also points to the domestication of intersex
phenomena. Middlesex brings mainstream attention to intersex conditions
precisely at the moment when intersex is being invalidated as the medical
term for individuals born with mixed genital attributes in favor of a clas-
sification as a “Disorder of Sex Development (DSD).”1 While many activ-
ists regard this change as an abandonment of identity politics and an act
of self-pathologization, DSD proponents—including prominent figures
in the international intersex rights movement—claim access to appropri-
ate and effective medical care as their motivating principle. Because it
stands to alter the terms of intersexed subjectivity, however, this waning
of the relevance of intersex in medical circles also predicts the departure
of intersex identity from the alliance of sexual minorities represented in
the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) civil rights movement.2
In this essay, I historicize Eugenides’s novel against these developments
in order to shed new light on Callie’s refusal of corrective surgery and
on Cal’s subsequent choice to live as a “stealth” man, to employ the term
used by transgender and intersexed communities to describe individuals
who do not publicly disclose the fact of their gender transition.
Changes in the meaning of intersex over the last twenty years pro-
vide an important cultural context for understanding the absence of inter-
sex identity as a viable social formation in Middlesex. At the same time,
the novel’s adoption of a post-identity framework to represent the inter-
sexed experience points to major shifts in the contemporary meaning and
uses of race and ethnicity. Specifically, the role that stealth plays in Cal’s
romantic pursuit of a fellow ethnic American, Julie Kikuchi, reveals an
alternate and frequently overlooked genealogy for intersex genitalia: the
sexing of racialized or ethnic bodies. Cal’s successful courtship of Julie
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has received superficial treatment in literary reviews and scholarly articles

on Middlesex, but since Julie’s companionship is integral to Cal’s per-
formance of heterosexuality, their union represents his memoir’s happy
conclusion. His cosmopolitan masculinity and his intersexed body are
both affirmed in the mirror of her Asian femininity: “‘Asian chicks are the
last stop. If a guy’s in the closet, he goes for an Asian because their bod-
ies are more like boys’,’” she declares (184). Julie is thus aware of how
their sexual attraction to each other resonates with the gendered implica-
tions of orientalist discourse, but Cal consistently denies his investment
in US-based paradigms of racial desire. Even his self-appellation, her-
maphrodite, obscures the intersection of race and intersex in the novel by
locating the latter’s origin in Cal’s Greek ethnicity and the mythology of
Asia Minor. Viewed alongside Julie’s Japanese ethnicity, Cal’s amassing
of white privilege under the sign of immigrant assimilation lends a racial
significance to his stealth identity that has—like the notion of their sexual
compatibility—gone largely unremarked by critics.
In fact, the acceleration of post-racial discourse from the standpoint of
the immigrant experience in Middlesex parallels the increasing normaliza-
tion of intersex in the world of the text’s reception. By normalization, I
refer to the management of intersex through technologies of biometric
standardization, including corrective surgeries, the DSD diagnosis, and
the functional disappearance of intersex in the form of stealth culture. If
the decline in the significance of intersex identity is related to finding a
“cure” or otherwise eradicating intersexed people, however, intersex nor-
malization is also a sign of the heightened regulation of gender norms
and sexed embodiment. Although Middlesex’s narrator refuses this type
of medical intervention, the novel’s impact nonetheless contributes to a
discursive transformation of intersex from a question of social justice into
an issue for medical science. After nearly three decades of the intersex
rights movement, Eugenides’s novel fuels a renewed conversation about
the hermaphroditic body that has its roots in nineteenth-century sexology.
At issue in this essay is not the medical science of intersex, but rather
those narrative technologies that in the case of intersex phenomena have
proven capable of tracing social difference back to the biological body—a
body which, according to a biopolitical fantasy, might then be cured of its
heterogeneity.
Reflected even in the formal structure of its split narration (Callie and
Cal), this narrative shuttling between representations of social identity
and the “facticity” (Eugenides, Middlesex 479) of the biological body
corresponds to what Michel Foucault describes as the disciplining effect
of biopower. Following Foucault, Rey Chow refers to biopolitics as the
BIOPOLITICS OF INTERSEX 89

“systematic management of biological life and its reproduction,” and she

is specifically interested in how identity categories are reproduced by cul-
tural arguments that assert a biological basis for social formations such
as race, ethnicity, and sexuality (3). In Chow’s formulation, biopower
manages what critical theory has regarded as the agonistic relationship
between essentialized and performative notions of the self without reduc-
ing social identity to an expression of either one or the other. Chow claims
that a “habitual tendency in the West to privilege sexuality in the narrow
sense—as having to do with sexual intercourse, sex acts, and erotics” has
focused the discussion of biopolitics on biological rather than social forms
of reproduction (7). A central insight of gender performance theory, that
sex “[has] been gender all along” (Butler 11), has reaffirmed the biological
body as the stable referent of social processes of identification.3 Modeled
on this same paradigm, theories of racial performativity fail to register the
full scope of biopower in a different way, Chow argues, because they can
never shake the “residual biologism” attached to the meaning and func-
tions of race in other historical periods (24).4
At the vexed intersection of the biological body and the political sub-
ject, biopolitics determine how identity categories are continually natural-
ized, deconstructed, or resignified according to hegemonic interests. Chow
observes that in the present moment, ethnicity displays a unique biopoliti-
cal capacity because it offers individuals a mode of subjectivity that has
“mythic potential” for imagining new forms of belonging; it is therefore
more capable of indexing emergent relations and affinities than race, and
it also does more to explain the dynamics of social reproduction than sexu-
ality, narrowly conceived (25). In light of Chow’s critique of the Western
value of sex acts, the nonreproductive sexuality of Middlesex’s narrator
can also be reconceptualized as biopolitical, since his immigrant success
story is founded equally on ethnic assimilation and intersex normalization.
In a novel that explores these developments and anticipates others in the
discourse of post-identity, ethnicity ultimately serves a biometric function
by measuring and mediating biopower’s effects on the multiple-border-
crossing body.
Not until the novel’s final section is Callie brought to the Sexual
Disorders and Gender Identity Clinic by her concerned parents. This
delayed climax is orchestrated by Cal, and his first-person voice presides
over Callie’s life-changing revelation from the safe distance of the frame
narrative. At the precise moment when Callie learns what is happening
inside of her body, however, the narration switches to a mode of citation,
substituting for Cal’s self-assured voice the full text of a clinical report
authored by Dr. Peter Luce. Appearing on the novel’s pages as a type-
90 HSU

written simulacrum, this report is discovered by Callie when she is left

alone in Dr. Luce’s office on the eve of the elective surgical procedure
that she is told will be “an operation to finish your genitalia” (433). From
this document, “Preliminary Study: Genetic XY (Male) Raised as Female”
(435), the reader learns that what Callie has heretofore regarded as the
idiosyncrasies of her teenage body—her lack of menstruation, lengthening
frame, deepening voice, spotty facial hair growth, and her clitoris, which
she observes has morphed to resemble a “crocus . . . just before flowering”
(329)—are actually indications that she is genetically male.5 Reflecting Dr.
Luce’s opinion that social factors can trump the “genetic determinants” of
gender identity, the report prescribes steps to ensure that Callie’s pubes-
cent body will conform to her “sex of rearing.” Although she stands to
experience the “partial or total loss of erotosexual sensation” as a result of
the “feminizing surgery” intended to reshape her micropenis into a clitoris,
“[t]o leave the genitals as they are,” the text reads, “would expose her to all
manner of humiliation.” The report concludes that “sexual pleasure is only
one factor in a happy life” and should not outweigh the “ability to marry
and pass as a normal woman in society” (437).
Not meant to be seen by Callie or her parents, the clinical report is a
crucial plot device and its insertion into Cal’s frame narrative highlights
an important aspect of the novel’s metafictional style. As the means of
Callie’s self-discovery, the report allegorizes intersex medical interven-
tion and formally reflects the construction of intersexed subjectivity at the
moment of interpellation by the medical apparatus. The closing of the gap
between Cal’s and Callie’s relative self-knowledge therefore represents
the opening of the text onto intersex discourse. Citing the clinical report
is a stylistic gesture that references the scholastic process of self-actual-
ization that intersexed authors commonly recount in their own personal
and political writings. As Cheryl Chase, founder of the recently disbanded
Intersex Society of North America (ISNA), argues, this form of knowl-
edge production about intersex variations by intersexed individuals rep-
resents the redistribution of medicalized information between doctors and
their patients; in the 1990s, it signaled the start of a movement for intersex
rights on the continent and beyond (“Cultural” 133-35).6
Middlesex participates in this newly politicized circuit of knowl-
edge about intersex, and as a lay researcher penning his own memoir,
Eugenides’s narrator reauthorizes for his readership certain kinds of de-
medicalized information about living with an intersex condition. Yet Cal,
who finds himself dropped briefly into a nascent intersex community in
San Francisco in the mid-1970s, adamantly declares that he is not an activ-
ist, he does not “like groups,” and he does not consider himself to be “a
BIOPOLITICS OF INTERSEX 91

political person,” despite being a member of ISNA (106). When he later

states that his “psychological makeup doesn’t accord with the essentialism
popular in the intersex movement” (479), he employs a common critique
of strategic essentialism to justify his own withdrawal from intersex iden-
tity politics.
Attempting to address Cal’s political recalcitrance, numerous critics
have turned to the concept of hybridity to describe his stance on the plight
of ethnic or sexual minorities within the narrative’s historical settings and
transnational context. Francisco Collado-Rodríguez regards the figure of
the hermaphrodite as an embodiment of hybridity’s critique of categor-
ical identity and celebrates Cal’s ambivalence as the source of his com-
mentary on race and nation. Although she criticizes Collado-Rodríguez’s
use of hybridity as “utopian,” Debra Shostak similarly lauds Middlesex
for exploring the concept of the middle in order to create “figures of the
newly thinkable truth with which to rescue the hermaphrodite from the
position of the strange” (391). Quoting a prominent review of the novel,
Shostak admits that some have called attention to the “conservative agenda”
underlying Cal’s choice to assume a male gender identity and to enjoy the
social access—including heterosexual access to women—that it entails
(487).7 Shostak’s defense of Middlesex’s inherent progressivism leads her
to redefine political activism in relation to the novelistic genre: “Activism
may inhere in a commitment to a realistic mode of narrative, to converting
the utopian fantasy into the everyday. Eugenides seeks a language of the
real that may convince the reader that the strange is in fact quite normal”
(391).
However, Cal’s conspicuous method of narrating his encounter with
the intersex medical apparatus is more a sign of his erudition than his
activism. The reproduction of Dr. Luce’s report is a pastiche that reflects
Cal’s limited and largely disempowered engagement with the medical
establishment. Callie arrives at her own determination that Dr. Luce is
a liar, as she writes in a farewell note to her parents before running away,
only after consulting a dictionary about a medical term she overheard at
the clinic—hypospadias—which leads her to a trail of synonyms: eunuch,
hermaphrodite, and monster (430). Hybridity, as Shostak claims, may not
always be the stuff of “utopian fantasy,” but it is also worth asking whether
a middle ground on intersex can exist when the “truth” of identity, as
Callie discovers, is not unlike a sliding chain of signification.
Despite its taxonomic status in nineteenth-century sexology, hermaph-
roditism in fact retains little purchase outside of myth, since in its most lit-
eral sense (the dual possession of full male and female sexual reproductive
organs) it has never been known to occur in humans. Nonetheless, Shostak
92 HSU

accords significance to the biological implications of hermaphroditism for

its potential “to locate a genetic explanation for Cal’s position in such a
way as to draw not just an analogy but also a logical connection between
the discourses of ethnic and gendered identities” (386). By emphasiz-
ing the novel’s investment in the notion of genetic inheritance, however,
Shostak overlooks the role of specific narrative technologies in producing
the exceptionality of Cal’s subject position. Between the clinical report
and Callie’s farewell note, Eugenides’s “language of the real” succeeds
mainly at conveying a dystopian impression of intersex alienation.
Rather than view Cal’s narration through the critical lens of hybridity, I
will be considering here the implications of its “hysterical realism,” a term
coined by James Wood to describe Middlesex’s rhizomatic association of
facts about immigration and intersex. According to Wood, hysterical real-
ism has become the dominant mode of contemporary fiction, because it
asserts the “perpetual” rhythm of logical order against random chance or
unintelligible chaos; a product of uncertain times, it reflects the cultural
pursuit of “vitality at all costs” (par. 11). Cal’s attention to historical detail,
which allows the reader to compare the burning of Smyrna in 1922 to that
of Detroit in 1967, is an example of this type of realist drive; another is
his reliance on biological determinism, such as when he personifies the
5-alpha-reductase-2 gene, investing it with his own pre-fetal conscious-
ness. Perhaps what is most clearly hysterical, though, about Eugenides’s
fixation on the intertwined aspects of immigration and intersex can be
traced to this word’s Greek root: hustera, or womb. Its absence from
Callie’s body invites the reader to question this character’s “true” sex, just
as the variety of intersex conditions is commonly invoked by queer theory
and gender studies to deconstruct the binary system of sexual difference.
Yet it is estimated that only one in 2,000 children in the US is born with
genitalia featuring both male and female characteristics, and statistics vary
when it comes to intersex variations that are less visible at the time of
birth (Intersex, “How Common”). As exceptions that disprove the rule,
intersex phenomena have largely symbolic value in talk about liberation
from sexual and gender norms, but this is exactly the type of symbolism
that Cal—who is, by novel’s end, certain of his manhood—categorically
rejects.
For this reason, what Wood identifies as Middlesex’s literary style can
also be understood to convey a political impulse—or more precisely, a bio-
political impulse. Foucault describes biopolitics as the working of “power
situated and exercised at the level of life” and connects the disciplining of
the individual human body to the social reproduction of “the large-scale
phenomena of population” (137). Drawing on a similar notion of scale,
BIOPOLITICS OF INTERSEX 93

Wood explains that hysterical realism’s “vitality” consists in transcend-

ing the question of “how somebody felt about something” and explain-
ing instead “how the world works,” a move he observes has the effect of
aligning certain examples of contemporary fiction with the tradition of the
social novel or protest novel (pars. 11, 7). In other words, hysterical real-
ism’s “will to knowledge,” to borrow another phrase from Foucault, seems
less interested in psychological narratives than in those discourses that
reside in or can be enacted upon the body and, by extension, the body poli-
tic. Because of the hyper-referentiality associated with this literary style,
achieved in this case by Cal’s encyclopedic digressions and running com-
mentary, Eugenides’s novel reflects the public culture of intersex visibility
during the final years of ISNA’s operation. Yet Middlesex departs from the
conventions of the social novel by refusing to offer a representative type
of intersexed individual in its narrator; Cal’s substitution of medical opin-
ion for personal opinion at the moment of intersex interpellation, followed
by his stated break from intersex activism, are in fact urgent reflections of
the increasingly post-identitarian society that the novel works to explain.
In her discussion of the enduring significance of race and ethnicity as
population markers that facilitate efficient forms of social control, Chow
establishes a further connection between post-identity and hysterical real-
ism that is important to my argument. She restates biopower as “the imper-
ative to live—an ideological mandate that henceforth gives justification to
even the most aggressive and oppressive mechanisms of interference and
control in the name of helping the human species increase its chances of
survival, of improving its conditions and quality of existence” (7). While
intersex activism has historically corresponded to an effort to improve the
quality of life for individuals with mixed genital attributes, there is evi-
dence that identity-based civil rights movements have become less effec-
tive at securing either legal victories or mainstream support for minority
causes.8 By portraying stealth as an alternative strategy for intersex sur-
vival, Eugenides’s narrative in some sense heeds biopower’s imperative
to focus on the optimal conditions for human—rather than a specific iden-
tity group’s—existence. Since stealth also bears racial implications in the
novel, however, this post-intersex formation additionally unfolds in the
context of a post-race scenario which, as Chow warns, may prove to be
even more oppressive than the strategic essentialism Cal associates with
identity politics. The arrival of the DSD diagnosis, another post-intersex
development representing a major shift in strategies of intersex survival,
therefore points to more than just the porous border between activist and
literary discourse on intersex. Historicizing this coincidence at the heart of
Middlesex also suggests that the hysterical bent of contemporary literary
94 HSU

realism is linked to the changing status of sociality itself under biopower’s

advancements.
Eugenides has in fact refused to refer to Cal as intersexed both in and
outside of his fiction, favoring instead the older term hermaphrodite over
a marker that might correspond to a more overtly politicized identity. In
interviews when he sticks to this usage even as he alternates his use of
male and female pronouns for his main character, Eugenides talks about
free will as a trope of Greek storytelling and also as a contemporary politi-
cal virtue. To the perceived threat of a “moratorium on the use of the word
‘hermaphrodite,’” for instance, he responds both as a writer and as a Greek
American. To one intersex advocate in particular, a visitor to Oprah.com
designated by the gender-neutral name of “Reece,” Eugenides replies:

[Y]ou’re right. When speaking about real people, I should—and I do my best

to—use the term “intersex.” One of the first source materials I consulted when
I began writing Middlesex was the journal Hermaphrodites with Attitude
published by The Intersex Society of North America [ISNA]. The writers
in the journal have co-opted the term “hermaphrodite” in the way gay men
and women have reclaimed the word “queer.” Is it surprising, then, that my
narrator, who is intersex, might use the term at times? It’s paradoxical: Cal can
say “hermaphrodite” but I can’t. Or shouldn’t. (Eugenides, “Q & A” par. 4)

Cal, however, does not merely use hermaphrodite from time to time. In
fact, he expounds on the etymology of the word, weaves its origin myths
into his own plotlines, and pulls off a disavowal of intersex so total
that the term rarely even appears in mainstream reviews of Middlesex.
Nonetheless, the novel’s popularity had a major impact on intersex vis-
ibility in the years following its publication. When Middlesex was named
an official selection of Oprah Winfrey’s Book Club in 2007, for instance,
ISNA published a link to a “For Oprah Viewers” page on its own internet
Web site. An online reading guide at Oprah.com additionally parlayed the
novel’s controversial elements into polite conversation topics with pages
labeled, “Go Greek! Recipes for Your Next Meeting,” and a questionnaire
about gender behavior that asked readers, “Have you wondered who you
really are?” (Middlesex Reading Guide).9
After one of his public appearances was picketed by ISNA members,
Eugenides attempted to head off the growing controversy over his alleged
misuse of identity labels. Returning to the online forum for Oprah’s Book
Club, he conceded that “when speaking about living people,” he would
“try to use the word ‘intersex,’” but when dealing with Greek mythology,
he wished to “reserve the right to use the normative, historical term: her-
maphrodite” (Eugenides, “Conversation” par. 1). Protesters point out that
BIOPOLITICS OF INTERSEX 95

foregrounding this mythic genealogy means perpetuating a form of recog-

nition that has been identified as oppressive by intersexed people and as
scientifically inaccurate by a majority of medical professionals. Attempting
to distinguish living people from literary characters, Eugenides recasts this
impasse as a potential obstacle to his right to free speech and specifically
to the free expression of his own ethnicity. Rather than simply implying
that intersex concerns impinge upon Greek American interests, however,
Eugenides’s invocation of rights discourse points to the absence of the
intersectional figure that is often occluded by the single-issue politics of
identity—i.e. the intersexed ethnic, a subject position for which Cal is his
best proxy. Coupled with his earlier response, Eugenides’s impassioned
defense of the ethnic artist’s license to his own cultural material rehearses
a familiar conundrum of identity politics: Is it possible, he asks, that the
subject who has been injured by a certain discourse is the only one autho-
rized to reverse this discourse? Where the notion of free will meets the
logic of post-identity, a related question arises: Is identity, in fact, ever
optional?
To the crisis of narrative authority presented by such aspects of the
novel’s reception, Eugenides offers the concept of ethnic authenticity as a
solution. In other words, hermaphrodite acts like a stamp of authorial mas-
tery upon the text, since the narrator’s intersex condition is coextensive
with the other social formation signified by this mythological figure: Cal’s
(and Eugenides’s) “Greekness.” However, the appearance of Dr. Luce’s
clinical report in the novel complicates this view of ethnicity. The report
does not side with the available chromosomal and somatic evidence of
Callie’s maleness, but offers instead a profoundly social determination of
Callie’s femaleness. Because she has been raised as a girl in the “Greek
Orthodox tradition, with its strongly sex-defined roles,” the text confidently
prescribes medical intervention to maintain her gender identity; at the
same time, however, it worries that some aspect of her immigrant fam-
ily’s unsounded cultural difference may rise to challenge this diagnosis:
“In general, the parents seem assimilationist and very ‘all-American’ in
their outlook, but the presence of this deeper ethnic identity should not
be overlooked” (436). In the report’s wording, ethnicity reflects ambiva-
lently on those scientific advancements in thinking about the behavioral or
psychosexual basis for gender identity that structure Dr. Luce’s work with
transsexual and intersexed patients. Because Callie’s ethnic gender in fact
precedes her genetic sex, her experience serves as proof that gender is a
malleable social construction for most of the novel. Her sudden rejection
of Dr. Luce’s diagnosis therefore represents the novel’s potential indict-
ment of social constructivism, a notion that has defined the critical theory
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of the past several decades, and indicates its search for a different model
of identity formation.
What the depiction of ethnicity in Middlesex entails—ancient gene
pools and endogamous kinship practices transplanted from foreign lands
and unleashed in modern times—turns out to be exactly where the gen-
der trouble lies. Desdemona and Lefty, Cal’s grandparents, are siblings
engaged in an incestuous union, but their taboo relation is erased when
their processing interview at Ellis Island presents these two refugees with
an opportunity to improvise their identities and legalize their marriage.
Their secret is kept from the next generation, and Cal’s parents, Tessie and
Milton, marry without realizing they are in fact much closer than cousins.
The Stephanides family tree is partially reconstructed by Dr. Luce and
his colleagues during the brief time that Callie is under their care, how-
ever, and a transmission record of her special recessive gene is entered
into textbooks with titles such as Genetics and Heredity. This informa-
tion about his every close and extended relative is accompanied, Cal tells
us in the opening sentences of the novel, by naked images of Callie’s
body, her eyes covered with a black rectangle after a practice of medical
photography that many intersex activists have compared to child pornog-
raphy. The resemblance these pictures also bear to anatomical studies of
racialized populations subject to the colonial gaze offers another context
for Dr. Luce’s hypothesis about ethnicity’s constitutive effects on sex: the
discourse of sexual perversity historically associated with racialized bod-
ies echoes in his suspicion that Callie’s “deeper ethnic identity” might
furnish the motivation to pursue “sexual pleasure” beyond the borders of
normative gender.
In fact, ethnicity is the primary vehicle for exploring, domesticat-
ing, and ultimately naturalizing taboo forms of sexuality and gender in
nonnormative bodies in Middlesex. The Minotaur, for instance, serves
in Cal’s narrative to suture incest and the concept of genetic abnormal-
ity onto Greekness. While briefly employed in the Nation of Islam’s first
temple, Desdemona hears an indictment of her own incestuous coupling
in Minister W. D. Fard’s sermon about “tricknology” (154): in this origin
myth intended to demystify the roots of white supremacy, a figure named
Yacub creates yellow, red, and white people out of an original colony of
Black Muslims through the forced mating of ever lighter-skinned indi-
viduals. In addition to implicating the cruelties of racism, “tricknology”
directly names the narrative technology which, as in Fard’s fable, produces
biological or genetic explanations for the existence of social formations
like race or gender. By identifying with Yacub (even after Fard is revealed
to be a con man), Desdemona further underscores the text’s ironic equa-
BIOPOLITICS OF INTERSEX 97

tion of intersex and race as similar genetic mutations related to prohibited

sexual desires.10 Instead of ending her marriage to Lefty, however, she
submits to sterilization after this experience, suggesting that reproductive
sexuality is as bankrupt in practice as Cal’s cissexual (non-intersexed)
brother, Chapter Eleven, is in name. This provides another explanation for
this character’s moniker. Still, Desdemona’s fateful encounter with black
cultural nationalism suggests that the text is less anxious about incest than
it is about the concept of miscegenation and its thwarted aim: the social
reproduction of human difference through the categories of race and eth-
nicity.
As analytical categories, sexuality, ethnicity, and race exist in a state
of mutual imbrication that Chow describes as “categorical miscegenation”
(7). Callie’s encounter with the intersex medical apparatus reflects Chow’s
claim that “[s]een in the light of biopower, sexuality is no longer clearly
distinguishable from the entire problematic of the reproduction of human
life that is, in modern times, always racially and ethnically inflected” (7).
Indeed, Callie’s renunciation of her ethnic girlhood, an identity carefully
scrutinized and documented by Dr. Luce, leaves Cal’s emerging male body
in an initial state of racial indeterminacy. This is because race and ethnic-
ity are not coextensive from a biopolitical perspective, Chow observes,
but rather constitute different performances of identity that correspond
to different “modalit[ies] of global capital and labor” (24). Whereas the
provenance of racial categories reflects the “residual biologism” of ear-
lier organizations of peoples and cultures under colonialism, ethnicity is
a concept more suited to describing emergent transnational patterns of
movement and affiliation. For Chow, “the phenomenon of the hyphenated
American” (30) illustrates how ethnicity is immanently open to resignifi-
cation (30).
As Fard’s mock-eugenicist tale demonstrates, however, ethnicity per-
forms in its greatest biopolitical capacity when it is articulated alongside
concepts that are not limited to the nation. When referring to intersex phe-
nomena, for instance, the text consistently invokes a discourse of ethnicity
that draws its coherence from historically racialized forms of sexual and
cultural practice. For example, Callie narrates the experience of a clinic
visit during which her doctors, engaged in examining her own exposed
lower body, casually quip about the rates of incest, ritualized homosex-
uality, and the occurrence of mixed genital attributes among the famed
Sambia tribes of Papua New Guinea. Later Cal learns from an intersexed
activist named Zora that the Navajo have always accommodated gender
nonnormative individuals by honoring a “category of person” known as
the berdache; native wisdom, Zora says, teaches that “[s]ex is biological.
98 HSU

Gender is cultural” (489). Not unlike the doctors’ examination room ban-
ter, however, Zora’s tokenizing of this aspect of surviving Navajo society
reflects the modern subject’s fascination with vanishing cultures, and her
lesson about the cultural basis for gender echoes Dr. Luce’s medical opin-
ion about the “sex of rearing,” which Callie has roundly rejected.
From the narrator’s perspective, the agreement between the medi-
cal establishment and the activist community regarding the difference
between sex and gender discredits the truth of Zora’s simple proposition.
The fact that race and ethnicity are consistently invoked by both authori-
ties to describe and interpret intersex phenomena also complicates the
dichotomy between essential and performative identities that the formula
—sex is biological, gender is cultural—seems to suggest. Zora’s turn to
the ethnic authenticity of Navajo gender roles may express a more benign
sentiment than Dr. Luce’s suspicion of a “deeper ethnic identity,” but it
comes no closer to answering the question that is deferred in any symbolic
instrumentalization of intersex: whether intersex is biological or cultural.
Cal, on the other hand, has decided that his male biology is destiny and
the constructivist theory of social identity is a lie. This conflict between
characters is really a conflict between theories, indicating that sex and
gender are miscegenated categories within the novel’s social imaginary.
The clearest sign that Cal and Zora part ways on the subject of intersex’s
origins, however, lies in the reason for Zora’s commitment to activism:
“Because we’re what’s next,” she replies when Cal questions her choice to
be “out” rather than stealth (490). In terms of narrative development, the
biological miscegenation that produces Cal’s intersexed body is a rehearsal
for the categorical miscegenation of ethnicity, race, and sexuality that pro-
duces his own stealth identity.
Real-world knowledge about intersex reflects this type of boundary
rupture between existing categories of social identity. Ethnicity is fre-
quently correlated with mixed genital attributes in the evolving discourse
of intersex medicine.11 Ethnic subjects also have played the foil to inter-
sexed subjects in identity-based rights activism. For instance, attention
to racial and ethnic difference formerly characterized ISNA’s efforts to
build political—or biopolitical—alliances over the issues of pathologizing
medical diagnoses and unwanted surgical intervention. One of the defin-
ing moments of ISNA’s fifteen-year history is marked by the publication
of Chase’s essay, “‘Cultural Practice’ or ‘Reconstructive Surgery’? U.S.
Genital Cutting, the Intersex Movement, and Medical Double Standards,”
written in response to the 1996 federal Law to Ban Female Genital
Mutilation in the US.12 Here Chase argues that American doctors perform-
ing corrective or reconstructive surgeries on intersex infants should not
BIOPOLITICS OF INTERSEX 99

be immune from prosecution under the new law, which could otherwise
be regarded as a purely symbolic denunciation of the controversial prac-
tice of female circumcision as it has been documented in more than thirty
African countries.
While her essay seems intended to introduce ISNA’s work to a larger
readership concerned with women’s rights and human rights, one of
Chase’s bolder claims is that the exclusion of intersex issues from the
scope of the legal ban on genital cutting perpetuates the shame and silenc-
ing of more than merely the US intersexed population. She writes:

Media and scholarly discourses on “female genital mutilation,” however, have

not engaged these [intersex] surgeries, instead serving up only representations
of African women. These discourses continue a long tradition of making
Africans into the “other,” suggesting that ethnocentrism is a key factor in the
sometimes purposeful maintenance of ignorance about contemporary U.S.
genital surgeries. (“‘Cultural Practice’” 126)

The case for comparing this prohibited form of genital cutting with routine
intersex surgery is indeed compelling, since “feminizing pediatric genital
surgery” was “openly labeled ‘clitoridectomy’” by American doctors until
the end of the 1960s (Chase 132). Further, in medical literature from this
period, medical scholars frequently looked to “sociological data” gleaned
from observations of “African tribes” for evidence that the clitoris was
not “essential for normal coitus” (qtd. in Chase 132). “Most intersex man-
agement,” Chase states from personal experience, “is a form of violence
based on a sexist devaluing of female pain and female sexuality: Doctors
consider the prospect of growing up male with a small penis to be a worse
alternative than living as a female without a clitoris, ovaries, or sexual
gratification” (145). It may sound as if she has lifted a line from Dr. Luce’s
clinical report, but most surgeries on children with mixed genital attri-
butes are in fact “feminizing” in intention because gender assignments at
birth are almost entirely dependent on penis size.13
Chase’s main point is to interrogate the representational logic that
seeks to distance “female genital mutilation” from “feminizing pediatric
genital surgery” as qualitatively different biopolitical programs aimed at
the optimization of certain forms of femininity and female life. Despite
emphasizing the “[a]nalogous medical (rather than folk) operations per-
formed on intersex people in the United States,” however, she still comes
to the conclusion that “ethnocentrism” is an inherently negative form of
sociality that is a “sometimes purposeful” obstacle to intersex visibility
(“‘Cultural Practice’” 140). The reason for this attitude toward ethnic dif-
ference can be traced to another double standard at work in her reasoning,
100 HSU

for the analogy she draws between the medical and folk origins of genital
surgery also reflects an unspoken truth about the proximity between inter-
sex and African genitalia in the American imagination. In other words,
the racialized or ethnic body in Chase’s scenario represents the repressed
knowledge behind the biometrics of normative gender assignments and
also constitutes an alternate genealogy for intersex phenomena in the first-
world context. This is why instead of curbing the type of biopolitical con-
trol represented by the discourse of “female genital mutilation,” Chase’s
redrawing of the population at risk for unwanted genital surgery is itself
a form of biopolitical management, according to Foucault. If intersex vis-
ibility alone can provide ethnic subjects with the fullest measure of free-
dom from the conditions of hyper-visibility that define them as objects of
an orientalizing gaze, as Chase argues, then intersex causes seem always
poised to take precedence over “ethnocentric” issues.
A text that stands to make its narrator “the most famous hermaphrodite
in history” (19), Middlesex can indeed claim the achievement of bringing
ethnicity to the center of an intersex visibility project which, as Chase
observes, may have been impeded by ethnocentrism from the start. Just
as ISNA eventually traded identity politics for the medical label of DSD,
however, Eugenides’s novel exercises the biopolitics of intersex by trad-
ing narrative perspectives: Callie’s for Cal’s. A frequent interloper as a
child to Detroit’s Greektown, an ethnic enclave that borders an inner-city
African American community, Callie remembers “street-corner dudes that
would sometimes lower their shades to wink, keen on getting a rise out of
the white girl in the backseat passing by”; but years later when he returns
to the city looking phenotypically male, a defiant stare from a black man
on the street forces Cal to confess, “I couldn’t become a man without
becoming The Man. Even if I didn’t want to” (518).
In these related memories, “The Man” indicates the subject of the nor-
mative gaze and describes its vantage point from the passenger seat of a
moving car; in both cases, the narrator’s means of maintaining this prophy-
lactic distance from Detroit’s racialized inhabitants is reflected in the radi-
ating wheel-spokes design of the streets of Motor City itself. If “becoming
a Detroiter” means seeing “everything in terms of black and white” (156),
then the way that Cal also identifies with Berlin—a “once-divided city
[that] reminds me of myself. My struggle for unification, for Einheit”—
seems at first to suggest the interchangeability of binary oppositions, (race
for gender). However, the forty-one-year-old speaker of the narrative also
declares, “Coming from a city still cut in half by racial hatred, I feel hope-
ful here in Berlin” (106). In the context of this synecdochal play, being cut
in half corresponds to the feminizing surgery that would have preserved
BIOPOLITICS OF INTERSEX 101

Callie’s identity against Cal’s own biology; unification therefore refers

to Cal’s struggle to perform a male gender identity convincingly in the
adopted city where he is employed as a cultural attaché by the US State
Department. The fact that this hope for self-integration is explicitly related
to the reprieve from an American experience of racial anxiety, however,
suggests that his efforts to find a common ground between masculinity
and femininity are not coextensive with confronting the problems of race
and racism.
When compelled to explain his difficulty adjusting to normative mas-
culinity, Cal returns to a familiar metaphor: “I stayed away from [girls],
feeling they might guess my secret. I was like an immigrant, putting on
airs, who runs into someone from the old country” (471). The distinctions
between gender presentation, nationality, and class identity collapse in this
stock analogy, which seems finally unable to account for Cal’s transnational
mobility or his role as the state’s representative in addition to his transition
to maleness. As an expatriate in Berlin, for instance, the “old country” he
refers to could in fact be the US, and his initial interest in Julie—whom
he describes as “Asian, at least genetically”—is partly explained by his
ability to read her fashion sense and her retro bicycle, which he calls “[a]n
expatriate’s whim,” for tell-tale signs of Americanness (41).
Where the metaphor of immigrant assimilation appears most belabored
in the text is also where it begins to assume biopolitical implications: by
rhetorically posing as an immigrant, Cal is able to manipulate the metaphor
of border-crossing to portray ethnic assimilation and intersex normaliza-
tion as similar markers of his own teleological progress. More than a mere
state of mind, being a white man represents a tenuous material achieve-
ment that could be undermined at any moment by evidence of his previous
ethnic or gender affiliations. The contingent status of his stealth identity
becomes more evident when compared to the fixity of Julie’s genetic race
(though he admits that this may actually have little bearing on her national
or cultural identity). What makes Cal a man, then, is different from what
makes him “The Man” in the eyes of the marginalized subjects with whom
Callie previously identified: people of color, immigrants, and women.
Making clear this distinction between masculinity and patriarchy helps
to resolve a contradiction in the text over the ontology of gender, for while
Callie has rejected social constructivist theories, Cal’s struggle to per-
form white masculinity validates as well as reinvests in them. This ten-
sion between performative and essential notions of gender identity neatly
encapsulates the difference between the novel’s two narrative perspec-
tives, but it also indicates that biopower is at work on the formal level of
the split narration. In spite of Eugenides’s stated celebration of free will,
102 HSU

nature or fate supplies the alibi for Callie’s unwilling transformation into
“The Man,” the sovereign subject whose abstract representational status
offers all the benefits of political membership without the burden of social
identity. Because Callie is sacrificed in the name of intersex survival, her
symbolic death is not registered as a loss; to the contrary, her narrative
effacement makes possible the state of disembodiment that Cal associates
with social privilege and “putting on airs.” His intersex normalization ulti-
mately renders normal the distribution of narrative authority that consigns
Callie’s subjectivity to an interior position in the text and to a historical
past from which she—“wearing my skin like a loose robe” (42)—contin-
ues to ghost his frame narrative. His special biology therefore serves as a
rhetorical screen for his narrative choices. As Chow and other critics of
neoliberalism have observed, it is increasingly unthinkable that anyone
would freely choose—in a world where freedom is both technologically
mediated and synonymous with consumer choice—not to live to the full-
est extent that one is able. In order to apprehend the violence that lies
behind biopower’s particular incitement to live, we must therefore look to
Julie, the ethnic female who inherits Callie’s position in the text.
Julie’s marginal role in Middlesex demonstrates the place of abjection
in what Chow calls the labor of producing the ethnic self (111). Easily
alienated from its mode of self-representation, the ethnic subject repro-
duces itself, Chow explains, in the ruling group’s interest and for its profit;
thus, Julie depicts herself as an “Asian chick” and as “the last stop” on the
spectrum of normative sexuality. Her reading of Cal as a gay man in turn
activates a stereotype about submissive Asian sexuality which, in the pat-
tern of gender inversion she mentions, reflects back the image of the inter-
sexed body: Julie, like Callie, is a girl who looks and feels like a boy. It is
therefore significant that Cal and Julie first spot each other one morning at
a station on the Berlin subway where the train has stopped “to conduct an
exchange of bodies” (40). Indeed, in a lateral movement implying a simi-
larity between these two US immigrant groups, the text has moved met-
onymically from the Asia Minor of Cal’s ancestors to the East Asia Julie
ambivalently represents as a Japanese American. However, this notion of
exchange also highlights an aspect of Julie’s ethnicization: associated with
her genetic Asianness is the threatening image of economic globalization
linked to the dominance of Asian markets—a threat reinforced by what
Japanese automobile manufacturing might mean, for instance, to some-
one who grows up in Detroit. While Cal’s minor Asianness is capable of
being assimilated into the postindustrial US landscape, Julie’s enduring
ethnic difference leads her to guess at the orientalist logic operating at
multiple levels in the text. In fact, her skepticism about Cal’s attraction
BIOPOLITICS OF INTERSEX 103

to her reflects how routinely the feminine Asian body is called upon to
rehabilitate those embattled forms of American masculinity that Cal, for
one, embodies.
Julie is therefore a mirror for the indeterminacy of Cal’s bodily sex and,
more than the city of Berlin, her own expatriate body figures as the ultimate
terrain of his einheit or reunification. Their encounter also frames his nar-
rative in a larger sense, because Cal defers the event of their sexual union
and, after a few promising dates, manages to avoid her for much of the
novel. Once he decides to drop his stealth persona with her, however, the
facticity of his biology assumes a new importance in the text. Explaining
his intersex condition, he says: “‘What I told you about myself has noth-
ing whatsoever to do with being gay or closeted. I’ve always liked girls. I
liked girls when I was a girl’” (513). Although he is wary about conflating
his gender presentation with his sexuality, Cal’s attempt to map a stable
form of sexual desire onto his changing body nonetheless reproduces het-
erosexuality as a normative frame of reference for his life experience. The
version of intersex identity that he finally reveals to Julie depends on the
abjection of the lesbian potential preserved in Callie, whose liking for girls
forms a central preoccupation of Cal’s memoir. Submerged beneath the
presumably heterosexual orientation of Cal’s interracial relationship with
Julie is the shared construct of their ethnic femininity and, as suggested by
Julie’s own identification with boys’ bodies, the physical attributes com-
monly associated with this racialized embodiment of gender.
However, the racialized female genitalia which are genetically tied to
Julie’s body and which Dr. Luce offers to create for Callie constitute an
attribute that Cal feels does not belong to his own body. The ambivalence
underlying his attraction to Julie reflects what Chase implies in her analy-
sis of African genital cutting practices: the presence of racialized genitalia
on white bodies ultimately functions as the sign of intersex identity in
the first-world context. The fact of their sexual compatibility—“I might
be your last stop, too,” Cal offers Julie as pillow-talk (514)—reinforces
the notion that Cal’s intersexed body exists as the biometric standard for
Julie’s own. This sameness is what Julie avoids having to see when she
dims the bedroom light before they have sex for the first time; she then
deflects Cal’s inquiry into this gesture with an ironic retort about being a
“shy, modest Oriental lady” (513). Their mutual understanding depends on
the orientalist logic that structures knowledge production about the West’s
ethnic others—most notably, Chow says, in the form of the ethnic sub-
ject’s own self-knowledge (111). Julie’s awareness that she, too, might be
an intersexed ethnic constitutes the ground of her own abjection in Cal’s
narrative. Like Callie, she represents a form of queerness that must be dis-
104 HSU

avowed so that his story may arrive at its normative conclusion. With Julie
at his side and Callie in his past, Cal’s status as “The Man” is secure.
Fulfilling the cultural role of the modern-day hermaphrodite, the effemi-
nate Asian body is a product of the categorical miscegenation that not only
obscures any clear distinction between performative and essential identi-
ties, but also is responsible for fixing certain associations between racial-
ized bodies and sexual or erotic practices regarded as ethnic in origin. The
queer potentiality of the Asian body thus configured is consistently under-
mined, however, by biopower’s rationalizing discourse. From the fields of
global public health and genetic or genomic science, I draw two instructive
examples. In 1995, the World Health Organization’s Global Programme
on AIDS published data on “Regional or Ethnic Differences in Erect Penis
Size” in connection to a report on condom procurement and distribution
worldwide: the data shows that the Asian men in the sample had the small-
est erect penis size, confirming an enduring racialized assumption about
the Asian male body (World Health Organization).14 In 2003, a study by
a Japanese research team traced the occurrence of micropenis in a sample
of eighty-one Japanese men to a mutation on the 5-alpha-reductase-2 gene
(Sasaki et al)—the same gene that has been linked to Cal’s intersex varia-
tion. According to the parameters of orientalism, the labor of producing
the ethnic self must keep pace with knowledge production about the ethnic
body; the ongoing discovery of what makes a body “Asian, at least geneti-
cally,” constitutes a biopolitical effort to determine the optimal conditions
for Asian life, but with the understanding that such a body could never
represent the normative subject.
A work of hysterical realism that invokes these multiple genealogies
of intersex, Middlesex explores the biopolitics of intersex by portraying
a stealth survival strategy as an alternative to an identity-based model of
intersexed experience. Although Cal finds opportunity to criticize ISNA’s
strategic essentialism, the novel’s post-intersex ethos more accurately
reflects the organization’s culture after 2006, when ISNA declared that
it would be using DSD in place of the term intersex in all future advo-
cacy efforts. This unexpected announcement seemed to go directly against
the group’s grassroots vision, and it was followed two years later by the
organization’s dissolution.15 In May 2008, a farewell statement was put
up on ISNA’s home page to commemorate its own “scrappy, brave, and
confrontational beginnings” and to explain that, despite ISNA leadership’s
significant efforts to introduce intersex into the formula of LGBT identity,
“[w]e have learned from listening to individuals and families dealing with
intersex that . . . intersexuality is primarily a problem of stigma and trauma,
not gender.”16 Chase reportedly recanted her earlier activist writings with
BIOPOLITICS OF INTERSEX 105

statements such as these: “It’s confusing to label a patient’s medical con-

dition with a label that implies an agenda of radical social change,” and
“Label a medical condition, not an identity.”17 She claims that as a practi-
cal handle for medical professionals, DSD represents the epitome of the
patient-centered medical approach that ISNA has advocated since the orga-
nization’s inception. However, the group’s latest focus on the “stigma and
trauma” that intersexed individuals and their families endure contradicts
the spirit of ISNA’s earliest rallying cry: “Hermaphrodites with Attitude!”
Protest coming from other fronts of the intersex rights movement
reveals the far-reaching impact of ISNA’s actions. The International
Intersex Organization (OII), a network of activists based in more than a
dozen countries, is a source of vocal opposition and states on its Web
site: “Many people . . . feel that the DSD Consortium is typical of United
States imperialism and its abuse of power to define others and place them
in categories while they have no right to self-representation and definition”
(Hinkle, sec. B).18 Inclusion in the DSM-V, a text used by psychiatrists
around the world to standardize the diagnoses of mental disorders, will
fortify the grounds for recognizing intersex variations as disabilities and
intersexed individuals as patients with medical needs rather than as politi-
cal subjects with marginalized identities. While this implied pathologiza-
tion of intersex has angered some activists, others have already conceptual-
ized forms of solidarity with the disability rights movement and disability
culture.19 In fact, DSD proponents emphasize that the new diagnostic term
represents a good faith effort to become legible to a medical establish-
ment from which most individuals in the intersex community could never
declare a total state of independence, as Cal manages to do in the novel.20
If Cal demonstrates that abandoning intersex identity politics can be
understood as an act of self-preservation or self-interest—and therefore as
biopolitical—then Julie illustrates biopower’s uneven impact across social
formations and its unpredictable effects on ethnic discourse. As a concept
that mediates between older and newer technologies of the body, ethnicity
in the contemporary moment reflects the global division of labor around
the preservation and maintenance of certain kinds of biological life; in
this role, it is intimately tied to the culture of US imperialism, which OII
holds responsible for the reorganization of bodies and identities in the
wake of ISNA’s dissolution. By dispensing with the need to claim intersex
as a marginalized identity, DSD affords individuals with mixed genital
attributes the seeming opportunity to redefine and reapply the biopolitical
imperative to maximize their life options. Yet this post-identity formation
may not be an option at all for the ethnic body defined by its own abjection.
The possibility, for instance, that a great number of Asian men around the
106 HSU

world are potential candidates for intersex diagnosis and its related medi-
cal treatments seriously revises the stakes of the debate over DSD. Could
not this latest diagnosis, itself a symptom of categorical miscegenation, be
amended to read: “Disorders of Sex and Ethnic or Racial Development”?
Rather than shoring up the symbolic value or political efficacy of
intersex, Middlesex focuses precisely on this tangle of performative and
essentialized notions of identity by illustrating how race and ethnicity can
function as residual and emergent biometrics, respectively, for sex. The
predicted departure of intersex from the LGBT formula testifies to the
failure of this sexual identity formation to account for the racial and ethnic
genealogies of intersex. Indeed, the prevailing attitude in queer theory and
gender studies that sex “[has] been gender all along” specifically ignores
the ethnic body’s submerged connection to intersex in a relation that is less
hybrid, as the novel demonstrates, than catachrestic. The mainstreaming of
intersex stealth culture through Middlesex and, in a different but impend-
ing sense, through the DSM-V can be read in a way that brings attention
to the racialized and ethnic forms of life that are routinely abjected in the
transition from the politics of identity to post-identity. While the wan-
ing of identity in the field of intersex medicine has created opportunities
for rethinking the ontology of the intersexed subject, Eugenides’s charac-
ters remind us that biopower consists precisely of the notion that politics
should remain secondary to the body’s biological imperative not just to
live, but to thrive. As the current discursive limit of both intersex medicine
and identity, ethnicity is poised to deliver this biopolitical message—but
to which populations, it remains to be seen.

Notes

Thanks to Philip Brian Harper, Crystal Parikh, Ann Pellegrini, Cyrus R.K. Patell,
Michael Bérubé, Eden Osucha, Robert McRuer, and Martha Cutter for playing
critical roles in shaping this essay.

1. Efforts are currently underway to reclassify the chromosomal and somatic

conditions that constitute such attributes as “Disorders of Sex Development
(DSD)” in the upcoming fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of
Mental Disorders (DSM-V), published by the American Psychiatric Association.
Committees for the revision of the DSM-IV were formed in 1999, and the
American Psychiatric Association expects to publish the fifth edition in 2013.
2. The acronym frequently appears as LGBTIQ, where the additional letters repre-
sent intersexed and queer or questioning.
BIOPOLITICS OF INTERSEX 107

3. Judith Butler complains of this tendency on the part of some scholars. In a 1999
preface to Gender Trouble, she also observes that her theory of gender performa-
tivity may not be directly “transposable onto race” (xvi).
4. Explaining the underdeveloped connection between racism and biopower in
Michel Foucault’s work, Ann Laura Stoler observes that Foucault avoided the
issue of race and failed to place his history of Western bourgeois sexuality in its
proper context: eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European colonialism.
5. Callie is diagnosed with an intersex variation known as 5-alpha-reductase defi-
ciency syndrome, where the deficiency in question lies in her body’s store of the
testosterone responsible for the fetal development of male external genitalia but
not internal genitalia, which remain unaffected by the condition. Callie’s body is
therefore phenotypically female at birth, but with the onset of puberty, it begins
to virilize.
6. As opposed to medical information, medicalized information is a term that
seeks to undermine the objective authority of medical discourse and gesture at
how patients seeking access to certain kinds of care may reproduce the diagnostic
results expected of them in an information feedback loop. See Sandy Stone for a
discussion of the medicalization of transgender and transsexual identities.
7. This criticism is similar to what is known colloquially as the “butch flight”
argument, which holds that male privilege automatically accrues to female-to-
male transgender subjects and therefore provides an incentive to transition out
of a butch and/or lesbian identity. Cal’s intersex variation enacts this corporeal
fantasy of social privilege, and his late-developing masculinity also naturalizes
his phallic claim to the frame narrator’s role.
8. Janet E. Halley calls this growing resistance to progressive causes the result
of “antidiscrimination fatigue” on the part of the mainstream public (64). For a
discussion of post-identity strategies and legal disestablishment perspectives on
gender, in particular, see Paisley Currah, Richard M. Juang, and Shannon Price
Minter.
9. These statements were featured on the Oprah’s Book Club Web page in the
summer of 2007, when Middlesex was the group’s selection.
10. On the eve of her own elective surgery of getting her tubes tied, Desdemona
knowingly states her age to the doctor as “eighty-four hundred years old”— the
exact span of time separating Yacub’s mythical experiments in racial “grafting”
from Fard’s contemporary teachings (161, 155).
11. See, for example, Jill E. Emerick, Noelle Summers Larsen, and Andrew J.
Bauer.
12. This law was a rider to the Department of Defense Appropriations Act, Public
Law 104-208, passed on September 30, 1996. Hailed as a feminist victory, it spec-
ifies that anyone who “knowingly circumcises, excises, or infibulates the whole or
any part of the labia majora or labia minora or clitoris of another person who has
not attained the age of eighteen years shall be fined under this title or imprisoned
not more than five years, or both” (qtd. in Chase, “‘Cultural Practice’” 126).
108 HSU

13. Cheryl Chase goes on to explain that a micropenis on an infant that is shorter
than an inch long will be cut back into a clitoris and, if necessary, a vaginoplasty
procedure will follow, because—in the words of an anonymous genital surgeon—
“You can make a hole, but you can’t build a pole” (qtd. in Chase, “‘Cultural
Practice’” 131).
14. An appendix to the report on global condom use, this document compares self-
reported information from four groups of men—“Caucasian/USA,” “African/
USA, “Australia,” and “Thailand”—and draws on at least three different data sets
(including Alfred C. Kinsey’s original research) collected between 1938 and 1995
(World Health Organization). The issue of the report’s validity or accuracy is less
significant to my argument than the fact that it bears the imprimatur of the WHO.
15. Chase reflects on the political origins of ISNA: “I wanted ISNA to have a
different focus—[to be] less willing to think of intersexuality as a pathology or
disability, more interested in challenging the medicalization of sexual differ-
ence entirely, and more interested in politicizing a pan-intersexual revolt across
the divisions of particular etiologies in order to destabilize the heteronormative
assumptions that underlie the violence directed at our bodies” (“Cultural” 138).
Initially distancing itself from an existing network of support groups for individu-
als and their families dealing with “particular etiologies” of intersex like Turner’s
Syndrome or Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome, ISNA eventually took the lead in
building coalitions that united the interests of the intersex rights movement with
feminist causes and transgender issues alike.
16. The ISNA home page introduces ISNA’s audience to a new non-profit organi-
zation, the Accord Alliance, which intends to work with federal and international
agencies to implement the change in medical terminology from intersex to DSD.
In a further sign of change, Chase uses her legal name, Bo Laurent, in her official
capacity as a member of the Accord Alliance’s inaugural Advisory Committee,
revealing “Cheryl Chase” to have been her pen name.
17. Chase reportedly distributed a pamphlet titled “Why Change the Medical
Nomenclature?” at the annual conference of the Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome
Support Group (AISSG-USA), held in Las Vegas in 2006. These quotations are
taken from this pamphlet.
18. OII is currently active in Argentina, Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada,
Colombia, Egypt, France, Germany, India, Israel, Kenya, New Zealand, Spain,
Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, Tunisia, Uganda, the United Kingdom, and the
US.
19. See, for instance, Emi Koyama. Departing from the civil rights-based model
of social progress, radical disability rights critique has tended not to reproduce a
politics of identity as usual. Instead, its goal is “to de-pathologize the concept of
pathology itself” in the face of an increasingly medicalized culture (Koyama par.
40); it therefore stands to revise an understanding of social disadvantage that has
as its premise an interrelated model of physical and civic perfection—the healthy
body politic. For an example of a radical disability rights argument that accounts
for the role of race or ethnicity in the construction of the able body, see Eli Clare
(67-102).
BIOPOLITICS OF INTERSEX 109

20. Some intersex readers take specific issue with the appearance of normalcy
that Cal’s story of stealth survival entails. In her contribution to the OII website,
Sophie Siedlberg remarks specifically on the fallacy of Cal’s “‘[r]eclaimed man-
hood,’” calling this fictional character’s seamless transformation from girl to man
an “urban myth” in light of the treatable conditions typically associated with this
intersex variation, which can range from urological problems to questions of gen-
der identity (pars. 9, 4).

Works Cited

Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. 1990.
New York: Routledge, 2006.
Chase, Cheryl [Bo Laurent]. “‘Cultural Practice’ or ‘Reconstructive Surgery’?
U.S. Genital Cutting, the Intersex Movement, and Medical Double
Standards.” Genital Cutting and Transnational Sisterhood: Disputing U.S.
Polemics. Ed. Stanlie M. James and Claire C. Robertson. Urbana: U of
Illinois P, 2002. 126-51.
—. “Why Change the Medical Nomenclature?” OII Home. International Intersex
Organization (Organisation Internationale des Intersexués), n.d. 26 June
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