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On the topic of Middlesex, I came across a film called Tomboy.  It's a French film from 2011 and it tells the story of a 10 year old girl, named Laure, who decides to introduce herself as a boy to other children when she moves towns.  She interacts with her new friends as a boy while she acts like a girl at home.  It reminded me of Middlesex since it touches on the idea of transgender/transsexualism at a young age.  It also has the same idea of "rebirth" since both main characters experience a point in life where they are "reborn."  Although Cal's case is slightly different since he is intersex while Laure is biologically female.  Both the film and novel exude this kind of subversive sadness.  I felt almost helpless at some points of the movie and novel because there wasn't anything I could do.  I am still trying to process formally what my emotions and my thoughts are for these books...

Being that this is a story that displays hermaphoditism through the eyes of a teenager, it's no surprise that a lot of the book is centered around the physical body. Most of the scenes with Dr. Luce really emphasized what had already been the present throughout most of the book about the importancy of physical attributes as well as physical attraction.

The scene where Luce shows porn to Callie to see what sex she was attracted to really bothered me. Being physically attracted to someone, to me, doesn't necessarily mean you're more male or more female (especially thinking about the controversy surrounding the idea that changing your gender is a way to escape homosexuality). Judging Callie's dominent gender based on sexual attraction wouldn't show the type of attraction that Callie has for the Object which to me is a better indicator of her gender than anything. Of course Luce wouldn't know Callie's feelings about the Object because Callie is hiding that from him, but I felt like a lot of his questions were only surface level questions since most of what he's basing his diagnostics off of is in fact gender sterreotypes. 

It just makes me think about how sex can never determine your gender in the way that Callie's physical appearance (the way she carries herself, speaks, write, ects) can never determine which of her genders is more prominent. I've felt throughout this book that Callie's hermaphoditism doesn't affect her as much as it affects people around her (her parents, friends, etc) which makes me believe that it's not so important to her.

To be honest, I can't remember the first time I felt "gendered," it's a difficult moment to pinpoint in my life. I was told I was a "little girl" then a "big girl" then a "teenaged girl" then a "young woman," and I've come to accept this sort of consistency without much question or consternation. The earliest memory I have that I would account to being clearly defined by gender is in 2nd grade. It was lunch time. We had just gotten the KidPix computer game in the classroom. A boy I had a crush on and some of his less remarkable friends were fooling around with it and I wasn't very interested until I saw my Leah, one of my best friends, red in the face and sobbing. Someone said it had something to do with what Ryan, the boy I liked, and his friends were doing on the computer. I went over to look at what would upset Leah so much and I saw it: A little cartoon that slightly resembled her with a handle bar mustache paired with the title 'Sir Leah.' Oh dear. This was unquestionably offensive!  Girls were not supposed to have facial hair! Let alone fully developeed mustaches! And Leah did have a weirdly fuzzy upper lip...But that was besides the point! Her girlhood was being questioned and the fellow sisters of Sister Theresa Mary's homeroom were not going to stand for it. We waged a brutal playground war against the boys that day. And by doing so, we proved that Leah was still a girl and she did not and would not ever have something as despicably un-girly as a mustache.

The Easter story has been hammered into my brain since I was about 5 or 6 by everyone from my mother to the temperamental nuns who were responsible for my education. It was told to me in a way that I would never hope to understand, and thinking back on it, purposefully so: the mystical benevolent, scruffy haired godman with impeccable taste in white linens and a blinding golden aura reduced himself to a horrifying and humiliating unique punishment, died, went hand to hand combat with the devil, came back to life, walked around town and freaked out his friends, and flew into the heavens, having saved us all for infinite generations to come. Whatever the story, this meant I was not allowed to eat jellybeans for a month or say Hallelujah. Ever since I can remember, I attended solemn masses that reeked of incense and smoke, while the congregation hollered, "Were you there when they crucified my Lord?" Well, no, I indeed was not. In all actuality, the Easter holds little bearing on the sanctity of my soul as Jesus may have so earnestly intended. Being older, the Easter story is now more appealing to me as a special on the History Channel. I think less about Christ's mysterious powers and more about how crucifixtion was a common although vulgar punishment inflicted by the Romans and that the the successful "cross" was really a "T." I must say, that from a literary standpoint the Easter story, especially in the King James Biblical version, is an easily appreciable work of artful persuasion.

This is a remix of "If I Were a Boy" featuring R. Kelly. I don't think it's any less problematic than the original because it still puts the man in this traditional position of power ("how I work and pay the bills," etc) but at least it gets a male perspective in there a little bit. The song also points out that Beyoncé is making some broad categorizations about men in saying that women are always the victims in relationships. The one line I really like is "you are not a perfect woman, and I am not a perfect man". I thought it was interesting because we talked in class about how the video was one-sided and not entirely fair to men, and I saw this as a response to that.

A better title for this would be: "Your Brain on Stories," but still cool, I think.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/18/opinion/sunday/the-neuroscience-of-your-brain-on-fiction.html?ref=todayspaper

I was having a conversation with a friend about "A Game of You" by Neil Gaiman and found myself having difficulty explaining the plot. Not because I hadn't read the text but rather, because it was just to bizzare. I had to preface everything with "oh God, okay, this is weird but....". (Especially when I had to talk about Thessaly cutting George's face off and nailing it to the wall.)

Although I didn't particularly find myself drawn right into Gaiman's world unlike others in the class, I do wonder how it is that Gaiman, among many other authors, construct this world that (some) readers can get fully engrossed in. Reason and logic are suspended as a reader encounters this fantasy world. While this is the nature of fiction, I can't help but wonder what the boundaries of fantasy are.

This made me think about the genres of "fiction" and "non-fiction". I looked up a definition that young children are taught which is akin to the definition that was laid out for me when I first started to read:

Fiction - The books that are made up by the author, or are not true, are fiction.

Non-Fiction - Books that are non-fiction, or true, are about real things, people, places, events.

I started looking into my memories when Anne asked us when we first felt gendered. My mother tells me that I had a “girly” phase when I was three, where I’d wear lots of pink dresses and lacy gloves and a white hat with a pink ribbon.  Instead of sleeping with a particular stuffed animal, I’d bring my favorite object of the day into bed. Once it was the frying pan from my kitchen set, and once my new pair of shoes.  But I grew out of that, and my mom bought me overalls and other clothes that didn’t have a particular brand or princess on it, and let me grow out my Dorothy Hamill.

Now I wonder if my gendered phases in my childhood caused how I’m gendered now—well, I’m certain they affected it somehow, but is it directly because of my inconsistent display of femininity? Or was I just born to be ambiguous?

In class, we agreed that A Game of You is scary because it shows us that the boundary we draw between the dream world and the real world is not as hard and fast as we like to think.  This doesn’t feel scary to me anymore.  Isn’t it exciting that the things that happen in our head have the ability to manifest themselves in the physical world? I know that my imaginings inform my choices and my identity and...that’s cool!   

1. Memory and Forgetting: For me, these stories beg questions about the point of telling non-fiction stories.  If we can never remember something with complete accuracy, why do we tell stories in the first place?  Does the third story answer this?  Is it good or bad that every time we remember something (tell a story) the memory takes us farther away from what actually happened?  Should we try to make technology so that we can remember stories accurately/does voice recording do this?  How has Henrietta Lacks’ story changed because of Skloot’s book and the BBC documentary?  How have our stories changed as we tell and re-tell them?