Main Menu
Resources
Projects
© Intersex Initiative
Unless otherwise indicated, you may copy, reprint, distribute, and even modify contents of this web site under the Creative Commons license.
Reprinted from April 18, 2003 issue of Just Out, a Portland-based LGBT community newsmagazine.
On April 8m, the Pulitzer board awarded its annual prize for fiction to Jeffrey Eugenides for his novel Middlesex, the first-person autobiographical narrative of one Calliope Stephanides, a third-generation Greek American hermaphrodite (or, in the post-millennial vernacular, intersex person).
Eugenides (whose previous claim to fame is 1993's The Virgin Suicides) begins his much-acclaimed epic of family, gender and sex thus: "I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petroskey, Michigan, in August of 1974."
The heterosexual author has said that Middlesex was directly inspired by the memoir of a 19th century intersex person included by the controversial 20th century queer French philosopher Michel Foucault in his History of Sexuality.
Emi Koyama of Intersex Initiative Portland confronted Eugenides during his appearance last October at Powell's to discuss his use of the word "hermaphrodite" throughout the book. Regardless, she is pleased that Middlesex has educated many readers.
"While we find some of the things the author has said in interviews and at book readings problematic," Koyama says, "we do nonetheless feel that the book raises public awareness of intersex issues in a way that hasn't been possible in the past."