Question

Unconventionality

From Mary to Modern Woman and Middlesex

In 1963-64, the married women of Los Olivos (pseudonym), a small village in the mountains of Huelva, southwestern Spain, seemed typical representatives of Mediterranean culture. When housewives gathered at the public fountain to wash clothes, they wore drab, shapeless outfits, and many wore mourning. Most were overweight. Washing clothes and attending funerals were their most public activities. In the evenings married women stayed home or visited the sick.

Past and Present

• Twenty years later, in the summer of 1984, the new generation of married women presented

a very different picture.

• Instead of wearing drab, shapeless clothes, most wore outfits that showed off their figures.

And most had shapely figures.

• They worried about gaining weight, although some were notably more successful at dieting

than others.

• Married women no longer stayed home every evening.

• They spent weekend evenings with their husbands in the local bars, where they sat around

tables dressed in their most fashionable outfits, with heavy makeup and elaborate hairdos.

Why?

• Massive emigration from the countryside and the spread of television into remote

villages have exposed the present generation of rural Spaniards to ideas and

choices not available to their parents and grandparents.

• Adults exposed to “city ways”

• Anyone under 60 wants to be “modern”

• The author says this is not wrong, but it’s not the whole truth (“opening up”

hypothesis)

Questions to Answer • Why should married women in 1963-64 have worn drab

clothes, cultivated plump figures, and stayed home in the

evenings?

• And why should today's generation of married women wear

bright clothes, try to stay thin, and join their husbands at bars

on weekends?

• Similarly, why should young people today think it "unnatural"

to delay marriage until age 30, and why should they call village mourning customs "stupidities”?

Gender and Sex

• To understand gender we must understand

social inequality

• Femininity and Masculinity change when

inequalities change

Twenty Years Ago • A man's honor was a function of his mother's, sisters',

and wife's sexual chastity.

• A family's reputation depended on the sexual shame of

its women and on the readiness of its men to defend,

with violence if need be, its women's purity.

• A cultural concern for female chastity is not unique to

Mediterranean peoples. Rather, all complex agrarian

societies, including India and China, have forms of the

"virginity complex" (Ortner 1976).

Virgin Complex • The association of virginity with agrarian systems thus

suggests a first-level ex- planation for its occurrence: in

stratified societies where rights and privileges are vested in

status groups, female chastity becomes a cultural concern

because legitimate birth is the primary idiom people use to

claim, rationalize, and defend status privileges.

• The status and reputation of a family thus rest on the

degree to which its women are protected from penetration-

by women's own sense of sexual shame, by being locked

away, and/or by the courage of family men in repelling

seducers.

Marriage and Inheritance • Although a woman's sexual modesty was never without

significance, maidens enjoyed a freedom apparently denied to married women.

• Marriage marked a major turning point in people's lives.

• Due to the system of equal, partible inheritance, family estates were not maintained through time, but rather constituted anew each generation with the birth of children who united the separate inheritances of their parents.

• As a result, marriage, with its possibility for producing legitimate heirs, marked the point at which a man and woman passed from dependence on parental estates to responsibility for the future estate their children would divide.

End of an Era • When the system more or less

collapses in the 60s, inheriatance is no longer the major function of the economy.

• Just as in agrarian societies, a woman's penetrability is her

most important feature, so in industrial societies, a woman's

most important feature is the "womanliness" that differentiates her from, and makes her

attractive to, men.

Attracting a husband

• In a world where people's inward capacities and

preferences appear to determine their occupations, a

woman's biological capacity to bear children seems to

determine her apparently primary occupation of

housewife and mother.

• And, in a world where a homemaker's life-style is largely determined by her husband's income, a woman's status

and life-chances appear to depend on the kind of man

she can attract.

Honor vs. Initiative • The woman who takes care of her body and dresses attractively,

particularly as she grows older, displays her "womanliness" and testifies to the good judgment of her man.

• The woman of slovenly appearance, on the other hand, suggests both inward and outward failure.

• As the labor-intensive agricultural system collapsed, many migrated to cities as workers and/or wives of migrating men, while those who remained in the village found that farming shifted from a way of life to a way of making a living (see Harding 1984).

• The generation of people who came of age in the early 1960s, who grew up within a cultural system of "honor and shame," have thus been living their adult lives within a cultural system that emphasizes personal initiative and abilities.

MiddleSex

• Published in 2002 by Jeffrey Eugenides

• Thanks to a recessive gene passed down by his inbred family, Cal suffers from 5 -alpha-reductase deficiency syndrome, a condition that suppresses masculine hormones in the womb, but not at puberty.

• The novel moves beyond Cal's life, however, and tells the story of the whole family: from the flight of Cal's grandparents, Lefty and Desdemona, from the Turkish Army to America; to the courtship of his parents, Milton and Tessie, during World War II; to Cal's own childhood growing up in Detroit in the 1960s and 70s.

• Middlesex anchors itself to many specific historic ideas and events, including the Balkan Wars, the Nation of Islam, and the Detroit race riots.

• The Stephanides' journey mirrors that of the American Dream, of immigrants who move to America for freedom and opportunity. Along the way, they encounter racism, difficulty, poverty, wealth, rebellion, and tragedy.

MiddleSex

• Narrated by Cal Stephanides, a 5-alpha-reductase (genetically male but appear female) Greek-American hermaphrodite identifying as a male

• Book One begins in 1922 with Cal's grandparents, Desdemona and Lefty Stephanides, who are siblings living alone in a small village in Turkey, working as silk farmers.

• When the Turkish army invades Bursa and Smyrna, the siblings are forced to flee.

• They witness many atrocities as the cities burn down but, thanks to Lefty's courage and ingenuity, they manage to make it safely onto a ship that takes them to Greece.

MiddleSex

• From Greece they board a ship to America.

• On that ship, they realize that they are in love with each other, and that no one knows they are actually siblings.

• They stage a fake courtship, and before the journey is over, they have been married in a Greek Orthodox marriage ceremony.

• Once in America, they contact their cousin Lina Zizmo, who lives in Detroit.

• They tell Lina their secret, which Lina agrees to keep because she also has something to hide (she is a lesbian).

Questions to ask

• How does Eugenides make Cal's very specific condition universally relatable?

• How does Middlesex characterize hybridity and monstrosity?