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Comparative Humanities ReviewVolume 2 Symposium 1.2: A Collection of Essays byStudents of Love (Summer 2008) Article 52008The Politics of Transsexual Love: Hedwig and theAngry Inch and Plato’s SymposiumBryan Kim-ButlerVassar CollegeFollow this and additional works at: http://digitalcommons.bucknell.edu/chrThis Article is brought to you for free and open access by Bucknell Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Comparative HumanitiesReview by an authorized administrator of Bucknell Digital Commons. For more information, please contact dcadmin@bucknell.edu.Recommended CitationKim-Butler, Bryan (2008) "The Politics of Transsexual Love: Hedwig and the Angry Inch and Plato’s Symposium," ComparativeHumanities Review: Vol. 2, Article 5.Available at: http://digitalcommons.bucknell.edu/chr/vol2/iss1/5~*~The Politics of Transsexual Love:Hedwig and the Angry Inch andPlato’s SymposiumBryan Kim-Butler,Vassar CollegeAt the heart of the recent film Hedwig and the Angry Inch(2001) is the question of love. A stage play adapted and directedby, as well as starring, John Cameron Mitchell, Hedwig has becomewell-known as a queer film, exploring issues of gender, sexuality,race, nationality and performance. The film’s story, narrated byHedwig herself through voiceover and song, is roughly thus:Hedwig, born Hansel, is raised in East Berlin in the yearsimmediately after the Berlin Wall is erected. The young Hansellistens to American rock music and dreams of escapingCommunist East Berlin, which he does by becoming Hedwig,taking his mother’s name, marrying an American G.I. and movingto the US. But the sex reassignment surgery Hansel/Hedwig mustundergo goes wrong, and she is left with “a one-inch mound offlesh,”1 the titular Angry Inch she eventually takes as the name ofher band.I frame love in Hedwig and the Angry Inch as a question, as itfunctions in the story in often ambiguous and unexpected ways.The prospect of love also functions as a question, or rather aquality of life put into question by a threat, in the real life of DavidReimer, who became known in the 1970s as the “Joan/John Case,”another instance of medical intervention gone wrong, a case I willelaborate to reflect back on Hedwig. I am providing a reading oftrans narratives in light of and exemplified by Hedwig and Reimer.I will suggest that love in trans narratives, far from a pure ortranscendental category, often operates as a mechanism of socialThe Comparative Humanities Review38control and domination. The prospect of love or lack thereof, holdsa threat that has been utilized to forcibly define the limits ofintelligibility, of what will count as true and what will be possible.In this way, love operates as an instrument in what Foucault callsthe politics of truth, the power/knowledge structures that definethe possibility of what we can know to be true.Hedwig and the Angry Inch is largely about origins. Thecentral song of the film, “The Origin of Love,” recountsAristophanes’ familiar myth from the Symposium. Hedwig begins:When the earth was still flat, and clouds made of fire, and mountainsstretched up to the sky, sometimes higher, folks roamed the earth likebig rolling kegs, they had two sets of arms, they had two sets of legs,they had two faces peering out of one giant head, so they could watch allaround them as they talked, while they read; and they never knewnothing of love, it was before the origin of love.2Aristophanes’ speech describes the original humans as being ofthree kinds; male beings who were the offspring of the sun, femalebeings of the earth, and “androgynous” beings of the moon. Whentheir ambitions became threatening to the gods, Zeus cut thebeings apart into individual bodies as we know them.Aristophanes continues:This, then, is the source of our desire to love each other. Love is born intoevery human being; it calls back the halves of our original naturetogether; it tries to make one out of two and heal the wound of humannature.3At the end of the song, Hedwig directs her words to a “you”: “Thelast time I saw you, we’d just split in two.”4To whom is Hedwig singing? Tommy, her future loverwho will eventually betray her? Or perhaps herself? Leo Bersani’sreading of the Symposium, which he calls “[p]erhaps the foundingtext of desire as lack in the Western tradition,”5 provides insightinto these textual ambiguities. He reads Socrates’ questioning ofAgathon as instituting the idea of desire being a state of absence:Love cannot be beautiful if it desires beauty. But, as Bersaniargues, Socrates does not in fact have textual authority; theSymposium is a “highly selective and approximate account”6 andthe voice that might be given authority, Diotima’s, is heard onlythrough a recreation from Socrates’ memory. This means“meaning itself is reconceived as a certain kind of movement”7 inTHE COMPARATIVE HUMANITIES REVIEW 39the text, which calls our attention to its “disseminated authority.”8Diotima’s articulation of Love as an intermediary is a “textual echoof our textual betweenness” – a betweenness that Hedwig alsodisplays. Hedwig’s intermediary qualities occur in herrelationships, including her relationship to herself, to her ownbody and psyche.Bersani continues, discussing Aristophanes’ myth, namelythe question – can one desire oneself?:If love in Aristophanes’ fable is a desire motivated by lack or need, whatthe lover lacks is identical to what he is. It is more of what he is. This is alack based not on difference…but rather on the extensibility ofsameness…All being moves toward, corresponds with itself outside ofitself…We love, in other words, inaccurate replications of ourselves.10In this movement of the self toward its self outside of itself, Hanselseeks to find his double in America, explaining to his mother thatsoldier Luther Robinson is going to “get me the hell out of here.”11When Luther leaves Hedwig in a trailer park in Kansas City in1989, she is further distraught by news from the television that theBerlin Wall has just been brought down. The promise of love,based on a transnational and transgendered journey, had hadpolitics in its scope the entire time.Hedwig’s next lover, a teenager named Tommy Spec, is aborn-again Christian whose father is an abusive Army general. It isof note that all of the men in Hedwig’s formative years areconnected to the U.S. military: her father was also an American G.I.The betrayals and lost love she experiences are played against abackdrop of military presence. Tommy, explaining the Biblical taleof the Fall, another origin story, says, of Jesus,You know what He saved us from was his fucking father. I mean, whatkind of God creates Adam in his image, pulls Eve out of him to keep himcompany, and then tells them not to eat from the Tree of Knowledge? …Eve just wanted to know shit.12The story of paradise lost introduces the question of knowledge aswell as its connection to the question of love. “She gave him theapple because they were in love,”13 Tommy says. Just after shesings “The Origin of Love,” in voiceover, Hedwig raises a numberof questions of what exactly she desires, making love a question ofknowledge:KIM-BUTLER, Politics of Transsexual Love40It is clear that I must find my other half. But is it a he or a she? Whatdoes this person look like? Identical to me? Orsomehow…complementary? Does my other half have what I don’t?Were we really separated forcibly, or did he just run off with the goodstuff?14“[R]un[ning] off with the good stuff” likely refers to Tommy’sbetrayal of Hedwig: while they are songwriting partners andlovers for a time, he eventually steals the songs they write, evensongs she wrote before knowing him, and becomes a famous andsuccessful musician. Her authorship, in a way the authorship ofher own life, is stolen by the man who may have been her gatewayto the western dream of freedom: the ostensibly All-American boyshe mentors who yet betrays her by stealing her textual authority.The film’s present action consists of Hedwig and her band, theAngry Inch, shadowing his tour, playing gigs at diners andrecounting the story of her life in song.It is knowledge, or rather the lack of knowledge, thatseparates Hedwig and Tommy. While kissing, Hedwig movesTommy’s hands to her genital region, when he stops and says,“What is that?” Hedwig pauses and replies, “It’s what I have towork with.”15 The unknowability of deviant anatomy creates awall between teacher and student, lover and loved.In Undoing Gender, Judith Butler considers the regulatorynorms placed in the psychic life of gendered power, butinsightfully also thinks through the body, how social knowledgesabout gender are present in bodies. “[I]t is not just that there arelaws that govern our intelligibility, but ways of knowing, modes oftruth, that forcibly define intelligibility,”16 she writes. Butlercontinues:Justice is not only or exclusively a matter of how persons are treated orhow societies are constituted. It also concerns consequential decisionsabout what a person is, and what social norms must be honored andexpressed for “personhood” to become allocated, how we do or do notrecognize animate others as persons depending on whether or not werecognize a certain norm manifested in and by the body of that other.17To return to the case of David Reimer, I suggest that we may viewHedwig and other representations of trans love as existing within acertain disciplinary framework whose domain is knowability,thinkability, and intelligibility. Hedwig and Reimer share strangecontinuities, both being victims of medical mistakes that affectTHE COMPARATIVE HUMANITIES REVIEW 41their very personhood as viable gendered subjects. Both are inthreat of dissolution in the face of the law due to their precariouspositions in relation to and through gender.Reimer was born as what we understand to be a normal,healthy boy, but at eight months, his penis was burned andsevered by a doctor performing a routine procedure with amachine others found unnecessary, which he had excessivelyincreased the power to and burned away a major portion of thepenis. David’s distressed parents heard of Dr. John Money, apopular and controversial doctor who argued that a child could behealthfully and successfully socialized as the gender other thanwhat s/he was assigned at birth. Money recommended thatReimer be raised as a girl; they gave David the name Brenda andassumed things would proceed normally. But Brenda began toexhibit strong stereotypically “male” desires, which caused MiltonDiamond, a gender essentialist opposed to Money’s socialconstructionist thesis, to intervene. In his teenage years, Daviddecided he wanted to live as a male, and underwent phalloplasty,breast removal, and hormone treatment.Butler gestures toward a reading of Reimer’s story as anallegory with his body as marker:This body becomes a point of reference for a narrative that is not aboutthis body, but which seizes upon the body, as it were, in order toinaugurate a narrative that interrogates the limits of the conceivablyhuman. What is inconceivable is conceived again and again, throughnarrative means, but something remains outside the narrative, a resistantmoment that signals a persisting inconceivability.18The framework of power within which David developed can befound in David’s recalling his doctors’ advice and coercion:Doctor said “it’s gonna be tough, you’re gonna be picked on, you’regonna be very alone, you’re not gonna find anybody (unless you havevaginal surgery and live as a female).”19I continue with Butler’s apt reading of David’s comments: “HereDavid makes a distinction between the ‘I’ that he is, the personthat he is, and the value that is conferred upon his personhood byvirtue of what is or is not between his legs. He was wagering thathe will be loved for something other than this or, at least, that hispenis will not be the reason he is loved.”20 It is clear that theprospect of love was cruelly wielded by David’s doctors, whoKIM-BUTLER, Politics of Transsexual Love42threatened him with harassment and isolation if he did notconform to the ideas – the grid of social intelligibility – they hadmade manifest in his body. The “extensibility of sameness” andcorrespondence of a self “with itself” Bersani discusses aremediated in the terms and the name of social conformity, as wellas the very intelligibility that sociality depends upon.However, Butler insists that David retains a critical stancetoward his circumstances and his existence within them.“Something exceeds the norm,”21 she writes, referring to David’sinsistence that there is a difference between the value of whatgenitals he has and the person he is, the value of his self that maycome to be loved. “[A]nd he recognizes its unrecognizability,”22she continues: “It is, in a sense, his distance from the knowablyhuman that operates as a condition of critical speech, the source ofhis worth, as the justification for his worth.”23Butler conceptualizes the normative “restrictive discourseon gender that insists on the binary of man and woman as theexclusive way to understand the gender field”24 as one that“performs a regulatory operation of power that naturalizes thehegemonic instance and forecloses the thinkability of itsdisruption.”25 The symbolic law, for her, is enforced by theiterative utterance of “It is the law.” This “utterance…performatively attributes the very force to the law that the lawitself is said to exercise. ‘It is the law’ is thus a sign of allegiance tothe law, a sign of the desire for the law to be the indisputable law.”Butler’s claim rings especially true for those of us who have feltdistinctly policed by a law simply by a descriptive phrasing ofwhat the law “is,” for instance, “Heterosexuality is just natural.”David’s doctors’ insistence on their correctness, as well as theirsimplification of terms – “You’re gonna be picked on, you’regonna be very alone” – show the immensity of the “desire for thelaw to be the indisputable law.”26 The stated lack of love David istold to expect becomes a performative instance of the statement “Itis the law.”Hansel also comes up against a law, early on when Luther,the American soldier who wishes to marry him, informs him thatthe government will be doing a full physical exam, meaning hewill have to undergo sex reassignment surgery. The bodily normsthat have impacted Hedwig’s life from the very beginningcontinue through his relationship with Tommy, when Tommy’sconfusion at her anatomy sends him running.THE COMPARATIVE HUMANITIES REVIEW 43Yet Hedwig, like Reimer, maintains a critique of the rolelove has played in the definitional norms that have shaped her life.Perhaps echoing the interlocutors in the discourse of love of theSymposium, Hedwig says, “I believe love is immortal.” Tommyasks, “How is it immortal,” and she responds, “I don’t know,perhaps because…love creates something that was not therebefore.”27 In the inaugural possibility inherent in her statement isFoucault’s conception of critique: “critique…exists in relation tosomething other than itself: it is an instrument, a means for afuture or a truth that it will not know nor happen to be.”28Hedwig’s songs and performance – not least the performance ofpolymorphous gendered play – could be said to reflect whatFoucault calls an “arts of existence,” which he articulates as“those…actions by which men not only set themselves rules ofconduct, but also seek to transform themselves, to changethemselves in their singular being, and to make their life into anoeuvre that carries certain aesthetic values and meets certainstylistic criteria.”29 Hedwig’s artistry, her persistent idea that loveis creative, is the critical unrecognizability of her life, a questionrather than an answer. Hedwig’s transformation of her formerlymale self, the German child who idolized American rock stars, into“the internationally-ignored song stylist, barely standing beforeyou,”30 creates a continuity of love, a practice, a labor of love.ENDNOTES1. Hedwig and the Angry Inch, Dir. John Cameron Mitchell. KillerFilms and New Line Cinema, 2001.2. Ibid.3. Plato, Symposium, trans. Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff(Indianapolis: Hackett, 1989) 27.4. Op. cit.5. Leo Bersani, “Genital Chastity,” Homosexuality andPsychoanalysis, ed. Tim Dean and Christopher Lane (Chicago: U ofChicago P, 2001) 359.6. Ibid, 362.7. Ibid, 362.8. Ibid, 362.9. Ibid, 363.10. Ibid, 365.11. Mitchell, Hedwig.KIM-BUTLER, Politics of Transsexual Love4412. Ibid.13. Ibid.14. Ibid.15. Ibid.16. Judith Butler, Undoing Gender (New York: Routledge, 2004) 56.17. Ibid, 57.18. Ibid, 64.19. Quoted in Butler, Undoing Gender, 71.20. Op. cit, 71.21. Ibid, 72.22. Ibid, 72.23. Ibid, 72.24. Ibid, 43.25. Ibid, 43.26. Ibid, 46.27. Mitchell, Hedwig.28. Michel Foucault, The Politics of Truth, ed. Sylvère Lotringer andLysa Hochroth, Semiotext(e) (1997) 25.29. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume Two: The Use ofPleasure, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1990) 10-11.30. Op. cit.THE COMPARATIVE HUMANITIES REVIEW 45

The Politics of Transsexual Love: Hedwig and the Angry Inch and Plato’s Symposium

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