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Gender and Religion in Middlesex: An Unorthodox Treatment of Gender Identity

 

It was all around me from the beginning, the weight of female suffering, with its biblical justification and vanishing acts. (Eugenides 215)

 

Dawn Hathaway

October 3, 2008

Critical Feminist Studies: An Introduction

Professor Anne Dalke

Is Middlesex an Appropriate Queer Studies Text?

It has often been the goal of feminist organizations to protect and defend women. Recently, the “stop violence against women” movement gained popular attention. Such a movement is, taken at face value, hard to oppose. However, while any attempt to reduce violence is to be applauded, does this campaign not in some ways reinforce the notion that being female is somehow a disability? Does it not imply that women are weaker and therefore in need of special protection? Is stopping violence against men not an equally worthy cause? Rosemarie Garland-Thompson writes that “Indeed, equating femaleness with disability is common, sometimes to denigrate women and sometimes to defend them.” Efforts to classify women as

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My thoughts on sex and gender have been shifting throughout this course. When Paul Grobstein came to speak, I entered and left the classroom with the deep-set belief that there are two sexes, and two only. After thinking about it further, I’ve pondered about this idea, toying with the notion that perhaps there can be more than two sexes. Already I agree with the theory that gender is social and not always dependent on sex. Transgendered individuals struggle so much to switch genders that there must be some internal force pushing them to a gender different from their sex. No one would go through the ordeal of transitioning if there was no strong drive to do so, and therefore I must view sex and gender as occasionally independent.

In their article, “Toward a Theory of Gender,” Suzanne Kessler and Wendy McKenna urge us to believe that gender is primarily “socially constructed” as opposed to a natural, biological fact. In their 20 questions-like game employed to figure out what constitutes gender, Kessler and McKenna find that “certain information (biological and physical) is seen as more important than other information (role behavior)” in the process of gender attribution. More specifically, knowledge of which genitals the person has always constitutes the gender of that person. Moreover, once that gender attribution is made, it is the umbrella through which to observe

All quotes are from Chapter 7 of Andrea Dworkin's Intercourse: Occupation/Collaboration except for the quote from Catharine MacKinnon

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Calliope’s[1] mosaic karotype: an objection to mind-body dualism