Hedwig's Six Inches

Gender Without Genitals
From other issue one, June 2003

By Jordy Jones

Inch 1: Slip of the Knife/Slip of the Tongue

�Six inches forward, five inches back: I�ve got an angry inch.� It�s not just a lyrical hook, it�s also a comic device.

The sad �joke� of the angry inch has struck a chord with straight and queer audiences alike, but it has upset transgender activists, who see the movie turning mutilation into entertainment. Hedwig�s angry inch is funny - to those to whom it is funny - because it is a phantom of a phantom limb. The angry inch refers to the stump of his/her penis, partly excised in a botched East German �sex-reassignment surgery�. Hansel has no penis and Hegwig has no vagina. The Hedwig character is not transsexed but unsexed. �Trans� goes through, across and beyond genders, borders and bodies. �Un� cuts off, voids, negates and ultimately un-does. Transsexual R&B songwriter Veronica Klaus points out that when male to female genital surgery goes wrong, the results are not angry inches but shallow holes. But Hedwig doesn�t have a shallow hole. Shallow holes aren�t funny.

Inch 2: Mistakes Were Made

In the popular pathologization of transsexuality the question arises, �What went wrong?� This same question was once central to discussions of homosexuality. Variance as a natural and healthy manifestation of a diverse sex/gender �gene pool� was/is not considered a viable option. Hansel, the beautiful boy who grows up to be Hedwig, was sodomized by his father as a child. Although there is some question as to whether his father raped him because he was fem or whether he became fem/trans as a result of the assault, the connection between transsexuality and childhood abuse and sexual assault is clear. Hansel�s mother, who fled east rather than west when the Berlin wall went up, is little better. In the cramped confines of their squalid flat, she forces him to play in the oven with his radio, his head and his toys all stuffed inside. In one scene, a flash forward shows the adult post-op feminized Hedwig with her head back inside the oven, again surrounded by toys, including, in the foreground, a stuffed black �tarbaby� doll. Licorice-sweet, the tarbaby grew up into a big black sugar daddy. A sticky stereotype, the tarbaby�s been bad for blacks. Is Hedwig better for transsexuals?

Inch 3: Luther Robinson, Magic Negro

Hansel listens to American Forces radio and dreams of escape to America. His desire to go west is motivated not by any desire to escape the repressive political environment of East Germany, but rather by a desire to escape its repressive aesthetic environment. He gets his chance when, sunbathing nude, he is discovered by the African American GI Luther Robinson who says �Damn, Hansel, I can�t believe you�re not a girl�you�re so fine.� Luther �the giant-size sugar daddy� courts Hansel with candy - gummi bears in every �color, creed and national origin.� He promises to marry Hansel, but does so with a caveat. The army will require a full physical examination. Luther tells Hansel that �to walk away you have to leave something behind� and Hansel�s mother (also named Hedwig) agrees, telling him that �to be free you have to give up a little bit of your self.� Luther is a black stud and Luther is a pimp. Luther isn�t gay. Luther is a �Magic Negro�. He is a plot device. He exists only to wave a big black magic wand over/into Hansel and turn him into Hedwig. The operation itself is only a formality. If Luther had the dignity of subjectivity he�d be on the D.L. (down low). In making a �girl� of the beautiful white boy, he fulfills the stereotype of the hypermasculine black man whose dangerous sexuality is an ever present threat not only to white womanhood, but to white manhood. Black men aren�t supposed to be gay and gay men aren�t supposed to be black. Commenting on this cruel rule, Tim�m T. West of the �homohop� crew Deep Dickollective declaims �Don�t let Faggots call you Nigger. Don�t let Niggers call you Faggot.� Luther is a bad cat and a good bad sugar daddy. He fulfills his role as trifling Mack Daddy by leaving the castrated Hansel, now Hedwig, for another boy. He, now she, now lives in Kansas, not in East Germany anymore. Luther has made Hedwig of Hansel and of Hedwig he has made the anti-Dorothy.

Inch 4: Gnosis/Agnosis - Who Knows?

Abandoned by Luther, Hedwig lives in a trailer park, works as a babysitter and masturbates her teenage born-again Christian neighbor Tommy in a bathtub. He is smitten and tries desperately and unsuccessfully to explain his strange version of faith to her. They pursue a torrid affair as she schools him in rock and roll. He takes her from behind but never kisses her and maintains a �near perfect ignorance of the front of me.� She, meanwhile, maintains a near perfect ignorance of the core of him, treating his faith with the same enforced ignorance as he treats her gender. In finally choosing �Gnosis� as a stage name for the Christian boy over the less appropriate choices of �Vile� and �Cyber� she gives his faith a nod, and is rewarded with a kiss from him. When she frightens him by pushing his hand onto her �angry inch�, however, they fight, and separate. He goes on to become a rock star, singing the songs they wrote together, and she stalks him, performing with The Angry Inch in all-you-can-eat fish houses in the shadows of the stadiums where he appears.

Inch 5: More Missing Tools - Taking it up the Yitzhak

One of the members of the �pan-Slavic� Angry Inch is the long haired, lightly bearded rocker Yitzhak.

"The cross-gender casting of Yitzhak (was) gratuitous in both the play and the movie. Who Yitzhak was wasn't explored. Neither was "why" "he" was. Was he supposed to be FTM? Was he supposed to be a drag king? � We're not told. Only Hedwig is explored. I didn't need the nod to other kinds of gender variant people�not if all they're going to do is stand there in the figurative corner." (Perlman 2002)

Yitzhak is in love with Hedwig, but she obsesses only on Tommy, and on his theft of her songs (her manhood?). A self-absorbed narcissist, Hedwig sees neither Yitzhak�s misery nor the reality of him, though she does silently perform shallow penetrative sex upon his motionless body as they lie spooned together at night. When Yitzhak lands a part in a production of �Rent� that is being staged in Guam, Hedwig steals his passport. Unable to love him, she is also unwilling to let him go. Raped by her father and coerced into an unwanted castration by her mother and her lover, Hedwig is a victim. Although she survives and is portrayed as a survivor, as a victim, Hedwig still victimizes.

Inch 6: Full Circle - Three Haves make a Hole

Camp is gender without genitals. (Core 1984:7) If drag queens are (gay) men impersonating women, Hedwig is a drag queen impersonating a transsexual woman. Real style reveals substance. (Mitchell as) Hedwig is no activist, but is firmly apolitical. Her substance is her style, her manner her only politic. She interrogates only herself. Mitchell�s maleness is, like his whiteness, a given. No questions need be asked and none answered. Exploration of self then demands a device. Enter the not-male and the not-white. Luther shows Hansel/Hegwig who he/she is and Hedwig helps show Mitchell who he is. He uses her to find and merge with his/her �other half�. In the final scenes, Hedwig, abandoned by Robinson, Gnosis and her band, finds herself alone, whoring in an alley. Passed over by a passing Orthodox Jew cruising for trans sex, drag-like in his frum gear, she is picked up by her nemesis, Gnosis. They enjoy a brief reunion, drinking, singing and kissing in his limousine before crashing into a truck. Gnosis� career plummets in the wake of his public association with a �transsexual�. Hedwig�s soars. Reunited with her band, she performs to a wildly enthusiastic audience. She passes her wig to Yitzhak, who dons it, instantly transforming into a buxom woman in a tight dress and red pumps. He, now she, is passed grinning from hand to hand over the heads of the cheering crowd. Hedwig becomes Tommy on stage, She, now he, is nearly naked, clearly whole and wholly male. Tommy sings that there is �nothing in the sky but air.� Yitzhak becomes a woman, Gnosis becomes Agnosis and Hedwig becomes Hansel. The trans characters return to their birth sexes and the Christian boy drops God.

"To be gay ... [is] to be free of a lot of bullshit. It�s a privilege that you have to take advantage of�I enjoy Hedwig�s being a mask-I can explore things that are meaningful to me through a personality and history that�s not mine.� (Mitchell to Planet Out: 2001)

Feminism introduced the idea that the personal is political. I would suggest that the apolitical is also political. Privilege can afford to be apolitical, to indulge in style without substance, gender without genitals.