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Jeffrey Eugenides won this year's Pulitzer prize in fiction for his novel "Middlesex," whose protagonist is an intersex person. While we find some of the things the author has said in interviews and at book readings problematic, we do nonetheless feel that the book raises public awareness of intersex issues in a way that hasn't been possible in the past.
Gay newsmagazine "The Advocate" posted an article about the Pulitzers on its online edition, but its title stated "Transgender novel Middlesex wins Pulitzer." So Emi wrote them an email--and within five hours, their web site is changed! The title was changed to "Intersex novel, gay playwright win Pulitzers," and the paragraph was re-written. Below is BEFORE and AFTER of the key paragraph:
BEFORE: "The fiction prize for Middlesex almost surely marks a milestone in Pulitzer history: the first book so honored to be narrated by a hermaphrodite, loosely defined as someone with both male and female sexual organs. Calliope Helen Stephanides is born a girl. As a teenager she begins growing a mustache and otherwise turning more than 'a little bit freakish.' Eugenides got the idea for Middlesex after reading a book by French philosopher Michel Foucault that contained a memoir by a 19th-century hermaphrodite. 'She could hardly describe the experience. She wrote around it,' he told the Associated Press in an interview last fall."
AFTER: The fiction prize for Middlesex almost surely marks a milestone in Pulitzer history: the first book so honored to be narrated by an intersexed protagonist, a person whose reproductive organs and other physical characteristics are of indeterminate sex. In the novel, Calliope Helen Stephanides is born a girl. As a teenager she begins growing a mustache and otherwise turning more than 'a little bit freakish.' Eugenides got the idea for Middlesex after reading a book by French philosopher Michel Foucault that contained a memoir by a 19th-century 'hermaphrodite,' as the intersexed were then called. '[The intersexed person] could hardly describe the experience. She wrote around it,' he told the Associated Press in an interview last fall."
The changes seem somewhat awkward, but we're glad that they are making an effort to get the story right.
You can read the revised article at: http://www.advocate.com/new_news.asp?ID=8288&sd=04/08/03
Posted by Emi on Apr 11, 2003