Congress Paper Abstract

Gender Without Genitals: Hedwig’s Six Inches

JORDY JONES, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, USA

The film “Hedwig and the Angry Inch” is quickly becoming a classic, and as it is entering the queer film canon, it is becoming exemplary of liberatory transgenderism. Its author, John Cameron Mitchell, is becoming sought-after as a speaker on trans* issues. “Hedwig” is a fundamentally apolitical work that has entered the realm of the political without acknowledging its troubling political implications or engaging with the communities it is being presented as representing. Hedwig’s substance is her style, her manner her only politic. She interrogates only herself. Having been coerced into a botched sex-change operation that resulted in “an angry inch” she is not transsexed, but rather unsexed. Mitchell, needing metaphorical material to interrogate his own ’feminine side’ and to develop the character of Hedwig, helps himself to the cultural caché of transsexuality. His maleness is, like his whiteness, a given, and is resistant to interrogation except through the devices of the non-male and the non-white. No questions need be asked and none need be answered. The character of Luther Robinson as a ’Magic Negro’ shows Hansel/Hedwig who she is, and Hedwig, as a ’Magic Tranny’, shows Mitchell who he is. The apolitical is, through its very refusal, also political.

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