Abstract
This article, written for the Group for New Directions in Pastoral Theology’s conference on the theme of “Emotion, Mood, and Temperament,” focuses on Middlesex, a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Jeffrey Eugenides, Professor of Creative Writing in the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University. The novel, set in 20th century America and written as a fictional memoir, is a coming-of-age story of Cal/Calliope, a man with an intersex condition caused by 5-alpha-reductase deficiency. The mission statement of the Intersex Society of North America (ISNA) states that the organization is “devoted to systemic change to end shame, secrecy, and unwanted genital surgeries for people born with an anatomy that someone decided is not standard for male or female.” This essay employs the resources of pastoral theology to assist in the project of ending shame regarding intersex conditions by offering a pastoral theological reading of Middlesex. As such, this essay is an example of the discipline of pastoral theology being employed in the field of medical humanities in particular and the field of clinical humanities more broadly, and it also serves as an example as to how one might offer a pastoral theological reading of a novel.
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Notes
For example, consider the number of cases where the sex of female athletes is called into question after or when they perform extremely well in the Olympic Games, as was the case with South African runner Caster Semenya (see Dreger 2010).
Mindy Statter (2012), a pediatric surgeon, has recently written a reflexive case report that expresses regret over how she and her team treated a 3-year-old patient (who was believed to be a girl) for a hernia repair. It was discovered during the operation that the patient had undescended testes in the hernia sacs. But the team did not tell the family of this discovery on the grounds that such news would trouble and confuse them. Instead, the team intentionally misled the family by referring to the testes as gonads, because gonads can refer to either testes or ovaries. The team then received consent to remove the “gonads,” and the patient was raised as a girl.
It strikes me that the debates about intersex conditions intersect with other current debates in American culture, such as debates concerning whether to ban infant male circumcision in California (see, e.g., Slosson 2011) as well as whether to allow adult elective amputation of body parts for reasons of personal preference (see, e.g., Elliot 2000). Until recently, medical practice has assumed that it is okay to put the scalpel to the genitals of infants, but medical practice has conversely assumed that it is not okay for surgeons to comply with the requests of adults who want, say, a pinky or an arm removed for aesthetic reasons. Why do we perform operations to remove parts of the body, such as foreskin, on persons who cannot consent (infants) but refuse to remove parts of the body, such as toes, on persons who can consent (adults)? Adults can, of course, request sex change operations, but why is it okay to remove a penis but not a finger? The assumption to justify these positions is that adults making such striking requests lack capacity [for a recent discussion of capacity assessment in clinical ethics, see Spike (2011)]. In any case, we seem to be having a hard time as a society answering these political questions about the body and the scalpel—to cut, or not to cut? Who gets to make these decisions, and on what grounds?
As one might expect, the terminology regarding “intersex conditions” is controversial and political (see Cornwall 2010, pp. 17–20). Cornwall (2010) writes: “The recent convention of scholars . . . has been to refer to ‘intersex conditions,’ describing those who have them as ‘intersexed,’ and using the term ‘intersex’ to refer to the issue in general” (p. 17). Also see Emi Koyama’s (2003) “Suggested Guidelines for Non-Intersex Individuals Writing about Intersexuality and Intersex People.”
Several commentators on this paper asked me to define “pastoral theology.” James Dittes (2003) refers to pastoral psychology as psychology from the pastor’s point of view. Following the same logic, pastoral theology is theology from the pastor’s point of view. Another way of putting this is the following: Pastoral theology is built from the ground up, not from the top down, so whereas systematic theology is concerned with how ideas (doctrines) relate to one another, pastoral theology is concerned with how ideas (doctrines) function in the life of the church. Pastoral theology, then, is sometimes in tension with systematic theology, as pastoral theology tends to be concrete (and concerned with emotion) while systematic theology tends to be abstract (and concerned with reason). For an example of pastoral theological thinking about the doctrine of limbo, see Capps and Carlin’s (2010) Living in Limbo: Life in the Midst of Uncertainty. There are, of course, exceptions to the distinctions that I am making here, but the invitation for the conference this year (written by Donald Capps) illustrates my point: “While theologians in other fields have tended to write about beliefs and behaviors, we pastoral theologians have tended to give greater attention to emotions, moods and temperaments. Perhaps our creative exaggeration is, in fact, that we tend to privilege the subjective experiences of the self over its more objective manifestations.”
See http://www.isna.org/. ISNA no longer exists, as it has been replaced by Accord Alliance (AA). See http://www.accordalliance.org/. The mission statement of AA differs from the mission statement of ISNA. I prefer ISNA’s mission statement because (1) it focuses on the issue of shame; and (2) ISNA’s transformation into AA was controversial and, it seems to me, over-medicalizes intersex conditions.
“Chapter Eleven” is a reference to U.S. tax law. This law involves filing for bankruptcy. In the novel, Cal never refers to his brother by name but only as “Chapter Eleven,” apparently out of resentment for Chapter Eleven’s irresponsible fiscal behavior with regard to their father’s business (he ran the business into the ground). This reference is often confusing to persons unfamiliar with U.S. tax law.
The title of the club is a play on (1) the name of the National Football League’s San Francisco 49ers, which itself is a historical reference to the California gold rush of 1849; and (2) the name of a sexual position, “69,” which is a sexual position where two people perform oral sex on each other at the same time (see Hooper 2003, p. 119).
Eugenides seems to be mistaken on this point, developmentally speaking, because babies are usually given a gender at birth—they are named as either a boy or a girl—and then they develop a sense of “I” later.
For the classic critique of the use of myth to think about medical conditions, see Sontag (1979).
In the novel, Cal explicitly mentions ISNA. He states that he is a member, but also notes that he does not consider himself to be a political person and so has never taken part in any of its demonstrations (Eugenides 2002, p. 106).
As I was preparing this essay, Lianne Simon sent me her book Confessions of a Teenage Hermaphrodite (Simon 2012). The book is written from a Christian perspective, and it attempts to offer a more compassionate understanding of young persons who have been born “between the sexes.” Unlike Middlesex, this work of fiction incorporates the experiences of intersex persons (see http://www.liannesimon.com/about-lianne/). It seems as though this, in principle, is the type of work that Hillman envisions, or a type that she could endorse. I have also recently learned that Sally Gross, Director of Intersex South Africa, is hoping to write a memoir. Gross (1999) wrote one of the earliest theological essays on intersex conditions.
For a philosopher’s take on shame, see David Sachs (1981).
In Capps’s (1993) discussion of three problematics of the self (pp. 86–100), he mentions the divided self and emphasizes the fact that in shame experiences the real self has fallen short of the expectations of the ideal self. He goes on to suggest that a theology of shame would emphasize “the reconciling effects of positive mirroring between the two inner selves that have been at enmity with one another” (p. 91). Thus, “Self-mirroring is a more powerful and dynamic expression of self-love than is acceptance because it involves positive regard for the other self, one that eschews any note or form of superiority or condescension” (pp. 91–92). In email correspondence with me, Capps informed me that this idea seemed to him then—and still does seem to him now—to be a pretty important point about “mirroring” as understood within a theology of shame. He further noted that he later picked up on the theme of “self-reconciliation” in his essay on “Erik Erikson’s Psychological Portrait of Jesus: Jesus as Numinous Presence” (Capps 2004). Here Capps (2004) agrees with Geza Vermes (1993) that Jesus was a “holy man” but suggests that this is “because he had come to terms with the ‘alien’ in himself and was therefore as ‘whole’ as any mortal could hope to be. Thus reconciled with himself, he personified the fundamental insight that we become present to others as we become present to ourselves” (cf. Luke 15:17) (p. 206).
On one’s fears being justified, see Capps (1999, pp. 104–105).
Another important example of mirroring in the novel, one that does not involve nakedness (and so will not be explored here), involves Cal’s friendship with a colleague at 69ers, Zora. Zora provided Cal with both reliability and acceptance (see Eugenides 2002, pp. 478–496). Zora, it seems, also helped Cal to begin the process of self-mirroring (see Capps 1993, p. 91ff.).
The depiction of ambiguity here in the novel suggests that some of the previously noted criticism of the novel as not being ambiguous enough is somewhat unfair and overblown.
It is important to note, however, that by endorsing risk I am not endorsing risky behavior such as sex with multiple partners; indulging in such behavior can be a way of avoiding or defending against authentic risk that leads to intimacy. The kind of risk that I am endorsing can be seen as a part of the nature of hope (see Capps 2001, pp. 75–77, 85–89, 120, 131, 157; also see Capps 2000, 52–56).
It occurs to me that the novel is dealing with problems of identity and intimacy and that this recalls two stages in Erikson’s (1963) developmental theory. Thus, while this paper has focused on Capps’s (1993) theological work on shame it could have focused on Capps’s (2002) theological work on the life cycle.
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Acknowledgments
A version of this paper was first delivered at the University of Manchester as a part of a conference hosted by the Lincoln Theological Institute. The conference, organized by Susannah Cornwall, was titled “Intersex, Theology, and the Bible.” I am grateful to Cornwall for her invitation, and for her feedback on this essay. I am also grateful to Rebecca Lunstroth for suggesting that I read Middlesex, and for her feedback on this paper. And I am grateful, too, for the feedback offered by the McGovern Center for Humanities and Ethics and the Group for New Directions in Pastoral Theology.
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Carlin, N. Middlesex: A Pastoral Theological Reading. Pastoral Psychol 63, 561–581 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11089-013-0542-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11089-013-0542-8