Week 2--Sex and Gender, Biology and Literature

I have always felt that sex and gender are two distinct things and this was confirmed by Paul's lecture. I do not agree however that the notion of two sexes is a social construction. Biologically speaking, the majority of people are born either male or female. Socially, the majority of people identify themselves as being either male or female. I do not see how such an innate difference can be attributed to social conditioning. Men and women are both hardwired and built differently. There are some parts of gender in a society that can be seen in the "story" of gender but are these differences really more socially than biologically based? Just because an individual falls under the category male or female does not necessarily tie them to a particular "story" in their existence. 

Reading Middlesex also confirms my ideas about there being two distinct sexes. Desdemona doesn't predict the birth of an individual but of a boy or a girl. If I was asked "who are you?" I would not immediately identify myself as a girl. I would identify myself as a person. This identification comes from my mind but biologically I would identify myself as being female.

Also on a side note, I found it pretty ironic that Desdemona's husband would lose his capacity for speech when Cal was born. One man lost his voice as a girl gained hers?  

When Professor Grobstein asked us about the difference between sex and gender, I have to admit that my mind went straight to the gutter and had I been brave enough to blurt out my answer it would have been something like, “Well sex is an action, you know the dirty deed, and gender is a personal distinction between male and female.”  Thankfully, I avoided this embarrassment.  I appreciate the idea that science can be explained with stories. It seems that the theories on the cutting edge are really just stories based on observations. Professor Grobstein wanted to warm us up by breaking down our differentiations between biology and literature in order to prepare us mentally for the larger leap of breaking down gender/sex distinctions. Although Professor Grobstein portrayed a biological perspective on gender/sex in nonconventional terms, I failed to necessarily make a literary connection.  His mathematical diction led me to jot down an equation calculating sex/gender based on the integration of cultural, genetic, and mental variables over time. I’ll spare you the complete details of my nerdy-ness, but the fact that given the same information I, again, ended up on a tangent leads me to a greater consideration of the idea that there are no genders/sexes. Because given similar environments people do not develop in the same way rather they can be refreshingly unique. It does not seem fair to limit our self definitions to constrictive and stereotypical terms like male or female when we can better do justice to our individuality through more flexible terms.  

I have felt a greater connection between literature and biology in Middlesex. Cal’s poetic descriptions of genetics and hereditary development draw literature and biology together. (I would love to be able to quote the text here, but I have been listening to the audio recording until my book arrives.) It is interesting that some of the readers are not necessarily distinguishing the narrator as male or female, because the voice narration is male, which I feel may limit the intensity of Cal’s transformation. 

At this point I’m not sure how my reevaluation of the terms and concepts of gender/sex impact my view on feminine politics, because I’m no longer sure how to define feminism or what qualities constitute a feminist.

There are two particular passages at the very beginning of Middlesex that really struck me because of their connections to gender/sexuality as a story and biology/science as a story. After the discussion on Tuesday, they held more significant meaning for me. Due to the fact that they were so prominent right at the start of the novel, I believe that they will be just as important throughout.

The first is right on the second page of the bok where Cal is making references to the Greeks and Greek mythology. I love the fact that this theme is presented here, because it provides a very good background for the idea that gender and sexuality are stories. This one has a basis in literature. Greek mythology is perhaps the best collection of stories that presents gender in a way that is very fluid with a minimal amount of modern social construction. For example, men and women both pretend to be the opposite sex, there are strong warrior goddesses like Athena, men can give birth (though not conventionally...Athena was born out of Zeus's head), and there are transformations like that of Tiresiasthat is mentioned in the book. There are so many possible stories and versions of these stories that can be connected in many different ways to produce a story to mirror your own. Also, many times I have noticed writers referring to gender and sexuality confusion in relation to the Greeks: (Ex. "the unspeakable vice of the Greeks," Maurice E. M. Forster p. 51).

The second passage that caught my attention is a perfect example that shows science as a story rather than a set of facts. Science is the story created by individuals to interpret observations and data with which which they have been presented. The opening passage about Cal's personal story mention the fact that people have written about him in scientific journals. Those are versions of his story that people have written based on observaiotns of his body that have made their contribution to his collective life stoyr.However, the part of the book that showed the different interpretations of science is the part about figuring out how to make sure the child will be a girl. Cal's fahter is convinced that fertilization has to happen at a specific time because of the speed of the sperm. His mohter never believed it to be true at all. His father's belief was skewed because of his strong desire to do anthing to make sure. His "facts"were also not firshand. They were from Uncle Pete who could have a questionable interpretation of the article in his montly subscription to Scientific American. There is also no way to know whether the article covered a reliable interpretation of conception statistics and methods. The garbled story at the end results form a process that could be likened to playing telephone with scientific ideas. It results in conversations like these, "'How does Uncle Pete know about having babies?' 'He read this particular article in Scientific American. He's a subscriber.' ... 'Go on. Malign the male sperms all you want. Feel free. We don't want a male sperm. What we want is a good old, slow, reliable female sperm.'"

I read this book last year for pleasure since I've heard great things about it. Last year I just read it and soaked it in, but after attending this class I have some new feelings towards it. After Tuesday's discussion about sex and gender and the difference between them, I was left confused because I had never really thought about the many different genders and the idea of sex meaning biological and gender meaning mind. So when I read book 1 for the second time, I could better understand Cal. When I first the book, I couldn't really understand the concept of him starting out to be a girl and then half way switching to indentify as a man. I'm still learning/understanding the notion of there being tons of different genders, and I could only imagine that it is a very hard thing to go through when deciding/are aware of the fact that one thinks he/she is not the way he/she was born. Plus, I really agree with the fact that culture/society influences individuals. Cal mentions that after he identified himself as a he, he would do what other males did in society to blend in. He would go to male restrooms and dress like a man. Also, both Desdemona and Lefty know they are not doing the right thing by getting married because it is almost shunned in society for siblings to marry. But when they are on the ship, the society they grew in is not with them on that ship; instead, there is a new group of people who do not know  Desdemona and Lefty's past, so it gives them a chance to make a new past that would allow them to marry and for them to feel somewhat satifisfied with them marrying each other. 

Professor Grobstein’s suggestion that biology, like literature, is composed of a complex network of stories relates to the novel Middlesex, in which the author Jeffrey Eugenides uses the lack of biological fact or certainty to create a compelling literary narrative. Although Book One does not really develop the sexual/gender complications that yesterday’s class discussion focused on, it does expose the way in which individual identity is simply a kind of story. For example, Desdemona and Lefty create a fictional history which then shapes their interactions and allows them to build a relationship accepted by their culture. What does it mean that this relationship is not one grounded in truth or fact? According to Professor Grobstein, such is an irrelevant point, for truth and fact do not actually exist. While, I can accept the fact that there is not such thing as an absolute, objective statement, I think that there can still be lies or clear evasions of the truth. It is this sense of lying or hiding that causes people to feel guilt. Despite her love for Lefty, Desdemona still feels guilty at the thought of marrying her brother and rejecting her cultural norms. At the same time, however, Desdemona’s intimate involvement with Lefty is unbelievably honest for it gets at the heart of their most basic human desires. Thus, we have a bit of a catch-22 situation: if Desdemona marries Lefty, she must lie about her historic relationship to him as a sister; if Desdemona refuses to marry Lefty, she conceals or burries her passion for her brother. Determining which lie is of greater consequence often influences gender/sexuality conversations. Individuals who are cemented in the idea of a pure gender binary may believe that individuals who are transgender are “lying” to society about their gender. Are they? Why does society care about such lies?

In reading Middlesex, I began to think more about Paul Grobstein's argument that biology is a story.  In the first paragraph of the book, Cal writes that you can see him on the pages of medical and genetic journals and books.  Until he wrote this book, his story had been told primarily in a biological way.  This made me think of the question that Professor Grobstein asked in the beginning of class - what is the opposite of biology.  We decided as a class that the opposite of biology was not literature.  Instead, literature and biology, at least at times, can be related.  Both tell a story.  Knowing this, how should we look at Eugenides' book?  What are the implications of combining biology and literature.  The fact that in this first paragraph Cal is contrasting the way in which his story had been told, and they way in which he is about to tell it, implies that biology and literature tell two different types of stories.  Yet in this case, they are both tightly linked.  If it were not for biology, perhaps Cal would not be able to tell his story.  However, it also seems that literature is allowing Cal to tell his story in a way which he had not previously been able to do.

 In relation to our conversation on the ways in which genes effect sex and gender, Cal seems to believe that genes significantly affect how we live in the world, as he writes that "we know we carry this map of ourselves around.  Even as we stand on the street corner, it dictates our destiny" (37).  It seems that in writing this book, Cal (or Eugenides), will explore the roles that genes play in culture, in sex and gender, and in our own stories.