"Theory Uncompromised by Practicality": Hybridity in Jeffrey Eugenides' Middlesex

Abstract

The intersexed body clearly challenges conceptual cate gories. It therefore can serve, like drag, as a case study aimed at both stimulating and troubling theoretical _attempts to account for the social construction of gen der, especially the relations among gender, sexuality, and the body. But because real people also inhabit intersexed bodies, suffering the social consequences of their exclusion from normatively cate gorized identities, more is obviously at stake in thinking about intersexuality than theory itself, as scholars such as Anne Fausto Sterling, Alice Domurat Dreger, and Suzanne J. Kessler have been mindful. The potential challenge uncovered by the exploration of the intersexed body echoes a problem that recurs in such political criticisms as feminism: the act of description, with its concomitant act of theorizing, does not necessarily support activism in the world, a politics of social change that might alter the lives of those who live on the margins. This is of course not news to scholars who regularly engage with the relation of theory to praxis, but mainstream fiction has not often taken up the challenge. Jeffrey Eugenides' Pulitzer Prize-winning comic epic Middlesex (2002), however, offers in its portrait of an intersexual protagonist a fasci nating representation of the slippage that may occur between the ory and what Eugenides terms practicality (258), in specific