Eugenides utilizes three generations of people, history, and personal experience to illustrate the mobility of identity. There are numerous ways the concept of the mobility of identity is revealed in Middlesex. The first being the traumatic experience of losing your home, livelihood, and even the name of a city where you lived. The Greco-Turkish war caused the Stephanides family to lose their roots and the Great Fire of Smyrna forced them into exile as refugees. But, out of the fire grew a new identity. Desdemona and Lefty spent days transforming themselves into a couple, rather than brother and sister, on their way to America. They lost their roots, but they wrote new ones on their route to America. Their identities changed.

The second form of the mobility of identity in Middlesex is not one that is forced, rather is placed upon the Stephanides family as they move between communities in the greater Detroit area. While in Detroit during the race riots, the Stephanides family exudes racism towards the black community in a way that allows them to exist as ‘white’, or not the ‘other’. In following their white counterparts in white flight, the Stephanides family’s identity shifts. Suddenly, the Stephanides family becomes the ‘other’ in the absence of an African-American population. The shift occurs because of the family's’ status as Greek-American, a family of diaspora, that exists in the threshold of their Greek and American identities without existing in either entirely. This example reveals that the mobility of identity is affected not only by force, but by one’s surrounding as well in a more passive way. A simple change in the makeup of population can change one’s identity.

The third, and final, example of mobility in identity occurs when Cal runs away to San Francisco to become Hermaphroditus at a Burlesque show. Here, Cal literally changes her identity to male from female. Cal possesses a literal fluidity of identity as a hermaphrodite standing in threshold of both the male and female forms. The literal mobility of identity that Cal possesses furthers the author’s intent to demonstrate the difficulty that arises in occupying dual identities whether that is gender or ethnicity, diaspora or hermaphrodite.

Before presenting my story map, I had yet to fully unpack the breath of the mobility of identity. Throughout all the presentations I could identify elements of a change in identity that related to Middlesex. Specifically Natalie’s presentation of Sayed Keshua alerted me of another example where a literal geographic place changes your identity. As a palestinian who speaks hebrew and lives in Israel, Sayed Keshua is treated as the ‘other’ even if he is an Israeli citizen and was educated in Israel. Ruby’s project on Persepolis also showed a mobility of identity through the author’s experiences in Iran and subsequent life in France. Marjane Satrapi existed in an Iranian society that did not represent her own views, but this new society was forced upon her thus changing her identity norm the norm to the ‘other’. I also changed my web map to a presentation after I saw everyone else’s maps during the presentations days.

Mobility of Identity manifests itself in many ways: forced, passively, and by choice. The concept can easily be applied to other aspects of travel, and experiences like Sayed Keshua’s in Israel and Satrapi’s in Iran. The novel concludes with Cal living as a foreign service officer in Germany amongst a large Turkish population. There is something lovely about Cal’s return to his roots in the final pages. The reader is taken through years of history, beginning with the devastation wreaked upon the Stephanides family by the Turkish army, only to conclude with the third generation living amongst a diasporic Turkish population in Germany. Cal must reconcile his shift in identity and family’s history as he lives in this new home.