Middlesex and the Intersex Body: Rewriting Gender in Contemporary American Fiction

Jeffrey Eugenides's Pulitzer Prize–winning novel Middlesex (2002) narrates the life of Cal Stephanides, who is raised as a girl before recognizing, in adolescence, an intersex condition inherited through a recessive gene passed down across three generations of a Greek immigrant family. This article examines how Middlesex uses Cal's intersex embodiment to interrogate the constructed and historically contingent nature of binary sex and gender categories in contemporary American culture. Situating the novel within the history of American medical management of intersex bodies, particularly the surgical “normalization” paradigm associated with the sexologist John Money, the article argues that Middlesex stages a direct critique of medical authority over bodily ambiguity. Reading the novel alongside Michel Foucault's introduction to the memoirs of Herculine Barbin—a text Cal explicitly reads within the narrative—and Judith Butler's theory of gender performativity, the article further argues that Cal's first-person narration enacts gender as an authored, retrospective construction rather than a discovered essence. The final section considers critiques from intersex studies scholarship that caution against reading intersex embodiment primarily as literary metaphor, arguing that Middlesex's significance lies precisely in how it holds these competing concerns in tension.