I read this incredible book a few months ago whilst on sabbatical (on my couch) and it blew my mind. And as soon as the Caster Semenya story broke a month or so ago I knew the story of the main character was the story of Caster.
Now to get this out of the way, I cringe whenever I hear the word hermaphrodite. Surely the journalist community is wise enough to know that this is a highly offensive term and it is like calling someone a nigger or a morphei or a stabane. The term is used to hurt and demean and should be stricken from any kind of reporting!!!
The correct term is intersexual, but I also think ‘middlesex’ is a little softer, less clinical and ‘androgynous’ a bit more endearing? To me androgynous means flexible and fluid in your identification. Who wants to be just one thing?
During my sabbatical I resolved to start reading all the Pulitzer prize winning novels and Middlesex was therefore on my list. It is a big book but because of the constant drama in the book it is very quick to read and totally engaging.
Middlesex is a story of Calliope and how she came to be and how she eventually found himself and continued to be, ‘in spite but not spiteful’.
The book suggests that the intersexuals develop that way because of a mix of genes that should not have happened. Calliope’s grandparents were brother and sister and I hate to ruin the beginning of the book for everyone reading this but there will be plenty other juicy bits in the book. The premise is that incest is the cause of this… (I don’t want to call it) deformity (because what you get from incest are people that resemble the characters in ‘Deliverance’).
The book proposes that because Calliope’s grandparents sinned when they got together, their punishment would be to have an intersexual grandchild. At least this is what the grandmother believes and she is very superstitious. In the world of the book you kind of buy into that and there is a scientific genetic drawing they do of why this is true.
Outside of the world of the book I am not so sure. Just as I have no capacity to grow eyebrows so too is the capacity to turn out one way or another.
But I get a feeling here in the outside world that Caster is getting punished for something that is not her fault, something that is not a fault, something that should be celebrated as getting closer to the ideal human. The chance to go through life and choose to do it not as a man and not as a woman but as someone far more measured and weighed with both sexes’ characteristics. I think it’s awesome and extremely sexy.
I suppose if Caster were to read this blog I would want her first to read the book, and then to know that she is supper sexy to me.
2 comments:
theere was a lovely little story in one of the newspapers - sadly I can't remember which. But they interviewed an intersexed person and she told of her activism...but also of her own experiences - the confusion others experience of her/him. When she/he was younger she/he would be addressed as a woman, and as she grew older and I suppose formed how own identity, somehow people associated that with male characteristics, so she became a man to many. But she/he says she/he is neither. There isn't a word to call it really - and that's the sad part I guess. Even the word intersexed just sounds a bit freakish don't you think? Kinda like homosexual, don't like that word either.
Ahhhhhhhhh, words...sometimes they work...sometimes they just aren't true enough or clever enough...or true enough.
I heard snippets of it driving home today. Was it on the Redi Direko show?
Anyway, totally agree, language sometimes fails s and forces us to fit things into where they just do not fit.
see definition of androgenous from dictionary.com. Androgyny is a term derived from the Greek words ανήρ (anér, meaning man) and γυνή (gyné, meaning woman)[1] that can refer to two concepts regarding the mixing of both male and female genders or having a lack of gender identification. The first is the mixing of masculine and feminine characteristics, be it the example of the loud fashion statements of David Bowie, Jeffree Star, Boy George, Marilyn Manson, Annie Lennox, and Visual Kei musicians, or the balance of "anima" and "animus" in Jungian psychoanalytic theory. The second is in describing something that is neither masculine nor feminine, for example the Hijras of India who are often described as "neither man nor woman" or angels which are often portrayed as genderless. http://encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com/androgenous
I like the word androgenous. But it brings to mid Data from Star Trek. Where does android come from?
You talk about hmosexual, is gay a better word?
Post a Comment