Fluent Essays

critique 1: In Matthew Henrys article about the film Hedwig and the Angry Inch, he asserts that at the end the film becomes a tale of self-acceptance, self-identification, and self-actualization. In your critique, agree or disagree with this statement.  critique 2: A review of the documentary Whether You Like It or Not: The Story of Hedwig argues the documentary does what the best documentaries do – it makes one appreciate the film much more. Is this true for you? If so, how did the documentary contribute to your enhanced appreciation for the film? Please use specific examples.       Read play Hedwig and the Angry Inch Read article “A One-Inch Mound of Flesh: Troubling Queer Identity in Hedwig and the Angry Inch” by Matthew Henry Watch movie Hedwig and the Angry Inch  https://endeavor.flo.org/vwebv/holdingsInfo?bibId=2572529  Watch documentary Whether You Like it or Not https://youtu.be/QZmQlz--qcs    Film Critique General Guidelines You will write ten critical responses to film adaptations this semester. Your responses should be brief, 1-2 pages in length, but detailed and thorough. Writing a successful critique means going beyond simply deciding whether the film adaptation was “good” or “bad”. Value judgments like “it was great” are impossible to support with any real evidence. Instead, carefully consider the effectiveness of the film adaptation, and how the creative choices made by the director, actors, and designers inform your understanding of the play. You may begin by simply asking yourself your general emotional response to the film (I loved it, I only liked certain aspects of it, I thought it would never end...) but that is merely scratching the surface. Your task is to determine critically and then articulate intellectually why you believe the film succeeds or fails in its adaptation of the play you read.  Justification of your opinions is key. There is no “right” or “wrong” response to a work of art. However, if your perspective lacks justification your opinions will lack validity. Stating “this film was effective because the acting was good” will not suffice. Why was the acting good, and what do you mean by “good”? Explain and use examples.  Example:  Incomplete: Among the cast, performance styles varied. Meryl Streep’s interpretation of Mother  Courage also appeared inordinately funny. Complete: Among the cast, performance styles varied; rather than fragmenting the production, however, this collage of techniques complemented the evocative and eclectic setting and highlighted the way that Kushner’s script spoke across specific historical moments. Meryl Streep’s interpretation of Mother Courage also appeared inordinately funny, thereby turning preconceived notions of the tragic character on their head and allowing the contemporary audience to see the play with fresh eyes.   (Excerpt from Theatre Journal 2007). The non-underlined portions merely state the author’s observations. The underlined portions explain and justify why these observations matter.   Use these general guidelines to inform your approach to writing your critiques. Each critique will have its own specific prompt. A One-Inch Mound of Flesh: Troubling Queer Identity in Hedwig and the Angry Inch Matthew Henry Enemies and adversaries They try and tear me down You want me, baby, I dare you Try and tear me down. –“Tear Me Down,” Hedwig Schmidt, Hedwig and the Angry Inch Gender is a complexity whose totality is permanently deferred. –Judith Butler, Gender Trouble Introduction In the late 1980s and early 1990s, independent film studios produced an array of films that can- didly explored the lives and experiences of gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and queer individu- als, inadvertently launching what B. Ruby Rich infamously labeled the “New Queer Cinema.”1 Among other things, these films helped foster visibility, making queer identity a more integral part of the mass media and queer lives a larger part of the national conversation. The commercial suc- cess of these films led Hollywood to follow suit, and within a few short years the studios were also producing films with queer subject matter.2 By the mid-1990s, gay-themed storylines and refer- ences to homosexuality were also plentiful on net- work television.3 In 1995, Entertainment Weekly, then the foremost arbiter of popular cultural tastes, published a special issue on “The Gay ‘90s,” claiming that entertainment had “come out of the closet.” In the cover story, John Cagle dis- cusses “gay-friendly” entertainment, which he sees everywhere in the 1990s, citing the success of films such as The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994), and To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar (1995) and the appearance of gay characters on television shows such as Roseanne, Friends, and The Simpsons. Given this, Cagle quite optimistically says: “In 1995, the gay stream flows freely into the main- stream” (23).4 In her introduction to a special “Transgender Issue” of GLQ in 1998, Susan Stryker similarly notes the sweeping changes occurring in profes- sional and popular attitudes toward transgender phenomena, pointing out that representations of cross-dressed, transsexual, gender-ambiguous, or otherwise “gender-queer” figures are ubiquitous in venues such as drag-queen and -king shows, gay and lesbian film festivals, and she-male pornography, as well as in television sitcoms, major motion pictures, billboard advertising, and a variety of mass media print sources (146). Gay, lesbian, and queer representation within main- Matthew Henry is a fulltime faculty member of the English Department at Richland College, where he teaches courses in composition, literature, and cultural studies. He has published numerous journal articles dealing with literature, media, and popular culture, and he is the author of the book The Simpsons, Satire, and American Culture (Palgrave). The Journal of American Culture, 39:1 © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. 64 The Journal of American Culture � Volume 39, Number 1 � March 2016 stream media became even more widespread (as well as more lucrative) at the end of the 1990s and the start of the 2000s, as evidenced by commer- cially and critically successful films such as The Birdcage (1996), In & Out (1997), Chasing Amy (1997), Gods and Monsters (1998), and Boys Don’t Cry (1999); by popular television shows such as Ellen (1994–1998), Will & Grace (1998–2006), and Queer as Folk (2000–2005); and by the dramatic increase in advertising aimed at the niche market of gay and lesbian consumers.5 In October of 2000, Entertainment Weekly published another special issue on gay culture, this one promising to take us “Inside the Gay TV Revolution” and to let us hear “Gay Filmmakers Sound Off.” There was little here that was new or news, but there was a good deal of celebration over the high visibility and acceptance of gay characters, actors, writers, directors, and producers, which made it quite clear that the previous decade marked a significant increase in the representation of queer identities in the mainstream media. The media’s treatment of queer identities calls for a serious critical inquiry among media schol- ars, one aligned with the academic discipline of “queer media studies,” a merger of well-estab- lished film and television studies practices with a “queer theory” perspective.6 The antecedents of queer theory can be traced to earlier work on social constructionism found in women’s studies and gay and lesbian studies, and to poststructural- ist literary and cultural theory, but two works in particular have been taken as foundational texts for queer theory: Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Epis- temology of the Closet (1990) and Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble (1990). Together these works dis- rupted traditional feminist theory, subverted “common-sense” beliefs about gender, sex, and sexuality, as well as binaristic thinking about these categories, and offered what Karen Kopelson calls “theoretical interventions of the first order” (17). Butler’s groundbreaking examination of gender identity construction, in particular, has undoubt- edly had an enormous influence upon the ways in which we now conceive of male and female iden- tity, sex and gender, and human sexuality. Coinci- dentally, though importantly, Butler’s text was published amid the rise of the New Queer Cinema. In her initial essay on the topic, “New Queer Cinema,” B. Ruby Rich acknowledges that the films she cites as part of the “queer film phe- nomenon” do not share a singular aesthetic or strategy, but that they are nonetheless united by a common style. She writes, “Call it ‘Homo Pomo’: there are traces in all of them of appropriation, pastiche, and irony, as well as a reworking of his- tory with social constructionism very much in mind” (32). One might presume from such a com- ment that Rich herself was then familiar with Butler’s work; it is clear, however, that Gender Trouble did not have any direct influence on the filmmakers Rich discusses, for many of the films that she cites preceded the publication of Butler’s book, and many others appeared very shortly thereafter. However, it is quite likely that Butler’s theories had an influence upon many of the film- makers who came of age during the 1990s and whose films, appearing near the end of the decade or at the start of the new millennium, reflect con- cerns with issues predominant at that time: sex and gender definitions, identity formation, gay and lesbian rights, and transgenderism.7 This essay offers a detailed examination of John Cameron Mitchell’s Hedwig and The Angry Inch (2001) as a means of discussing the legacy of the New Queer Cinema and examining the political implications of representing queer identity, sexual desire, and love in film. Despite differences in production, style, and subject matter, the queer films of the 1990s—whether produced inside the Hollywood studio system or outside it, in the world of independent film—offer striking exam- ples of the shifting attitudes toward gay, lesbian, and queer identity.8 Collectively, such films mark incremental yet significant steps beyond the limit- ing stereotypes of the past; indeed, what they offer audiences are images which serve to both challenge and redefine mainstream perceptions of queer lives. Hedwig and The Angry Inch goes one step further, moving beyond the reductive gay- straight binary and the accommodation of heteronormativity that defines, and thus limits, many otherwise “progressive” queer films. Hed- wig offers a loud and radical challenge to received A One-Inch Mound of Flesh � Matthew Henry 65 ideas about queer identity; in short, the film works to subvert binary categories, to contest hegemonic ideologies, and to destabilize essential- ist notions of sex, gender, and sexuality. Queer Theory and New Queer Cinema Queer theory has tried to examine how gay, lesbian, transgender, or otherwise queer identities can confirm the constructed nature of gender and perhaps lead to the deconstruction of the male/ female binary and heterosexual normativity. As John Sloop notes, the intent of much of the work in queer studies seems to be to demonstrate how “transgendered phenomena and queered ideolo- gies could potentially work to loosen, to make fluid, gender binaries, and heteronormativity” (167). Of course, transgender phenomena have been explored in many films of the New Queer Cinema, which may be seen collectively as alle- gories of society coming to terms with the “alter- native” sexualities that were increasingly visible in mainstream mass media during the 1990s. However, in “Queer and Present Danger,” her later reassessment of the state of the New Queer Cinema, B. Ruby Rich laments rather than praises the changes that the decade had wrought, claiming that “the movement itself is in question, if not total meltdown” (22). Part of the problem, according to Rich, was the increased commercial viability and visibility of queer films and film- makers. Rich claims that the “New Queer Cinema was more of a moment than a move- ment,” arguing that the films of the early 1990s were edgy, radical and unapologetic in tone because they were produced in the wake of the AIDS crisis and the conservative backlash of the Reagan years; by the start of the new millen- nium, however, the New Queer Cinema had simply become “just another niche market” for Hollywood (24). Certainly, the niche market theory seems borne out by Hollywood studio films such as To Wong Foo (1995), The Birdcage (1996), or In & Out (1997). But does the idea apply equally well to the more progressive “art house” cinema that increas- ingly constitutes the queer canon? Curiously, Rich cites Wong Kar Wai’s Happy Together (1997) and Lisa Cholodenko’s High Art (1998), two widely praised art house films, as “sounding the death knell of the New Queer Cinema” (24). According to Rich, films such as these, along with the more widely seen Boys Don’t Cry (1999) and The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999), simply offer a traditional Hollywood theme: kill or be killed. It is perhaps disingenuous to lump together these two films, but Rich does offer an astute observa- tion about the content of these and many other films when she states that “tragedy seems para- doxically to have been the favored tone of much of the New Queer Cinema” (24).9 Nonetheless, Rich’s conceptualization of the New Queer Cinema relies upon a binary opposition of gay (male) and lesbian works, which creates a distinct problem for media theory and criticism. There is a lament in Rich’s original article for the lack of les- bian or “dyke” representation; she says: “all the new movies being snatched up by distributors, shown in mainstream festivals, booked into the- aters, are by the boys,” and later she poignantly asks “Will lesbians ever get the attention for their work that men get for theirs?” (32, 34). What is not addressed in her essay is the viability of trans- gender identity. In short, Rich’s reliance upon binary identity categories to define queer cinema —for example, “gay” or “lesbian”—is in many ways a repetition of the binary already imposed from without—that is, “straight” versus “queer.” One of the reasons that Hedwig and the Angry Inch stand out so strongly in the queer film genre is its radical disruption of convenient and norma- tive discourses surrounding sex, gender, and sexu- ality. Hedwig creator John Cameron Mitchell offers a tale that appears tragic on the surface— thus in keeping with the tragic tone of contempo- rary queer cinema that Ruby Rich points out— but that is ultimately liberating and empowering. In short, Hedwig provides a “troubling” of sex and gender categories that goes well beyond what was ostensibly intended in a mainstream film such as To Wong Foo or even what was accomplished 66 The Journal of American Culture � Volume 39, Number 1 � March 2016 in an independent work such as Boys Don’t Cry. This radical “troubling” of sex and gender in Hedwig is indebted to and makes manifest the theories put forth by Judith Butler in Gender Trouble. As Butler notes, the constructed nature of gender can be demonstrated through parody, which Constance Jordan insightfully describes as “the self-conscious denaturalization and disso- nant performance of a subject who understands that identity is not more than an effect” (258). Not surprisingly, Butler finds her exemplar in drag performance. However, this is not a simple case of duality, of “original” and “imitation,” since this way of perceiving drag would essen- tially reinforce binaries that Butler is intent on deconstructing; instead, a drag performance, she argues, actually involves three significant dimen- sions: “anatomical sex, gender identity, and gen- der performance”; hence, in imitating gender, “drag implicitly reveals the imitative structure of gender itself—as well as its contingency” (175). Butler stresses, therefore, that even drag needs to be reconceived, not as a parody of an identity thought to be “essential” but as a parody of the very notion of an essential or original identity. For Butler, parody is a creative kind of resistance, one that offers individuals “agency” which might be used to prevent parodic repetitions from becoming, as she says, “domesticated and recircu- lated as instruments of cultural hegemony” (177). In her review of Gender Trouble, E. Ann Kaplan offers high praise for Butler’s theories but argues that Butler does not follow her project through to a satisfactory conclusion. She states: “[Butler] leaves us without any practical sense of what this new configuration might be—or of its relevance to the majority of the population. The theory stops short of the moment of contestation itself— of showing us what that would look like” (846). One could argue that it would look very much like Hedwig and the Angry Inch, in part because the excesses of drag performance are an essential element of the film’s overall aesthetic, but primar- ily because the character of Hedwig quite literally embodies Butler’s notions of parody, performa- tivity, and the impossibility of relying upon the sex/gender system as a marker of identity. Hedwig and the Angry Inch is the story of Hansel Schmidt (a.k.a. Hedwig), who grew up in Communist East Berlin, where he first meets Luther Robinson, an American G.I. stationed in West Germany. The two men begin an affair, and soon afterward Luther offers to marry Hansel in order to take him out of East Germany and into the promised land of the United States; however, since Hansel will have to undergo a full physical examination, he has to transform himself into a biologically defined female. As both Luther and Hansel’s mother say, in order to be free, he will have to “leave a little something behind.” The botched sex-change operation that follows leaves Hansel with “a one-inch mound of flesh,” the “angry inch” of the title, and thus neither man nor woman, at least anatomically speaking. Shortly after arriving in Junction City, Kansas, Luther abandons Hansel in favor of another young boy. Left to his own devices, Hansel struggles to sur- vive through a series of odd jobs—“mostly the jobs we call blow,” he says—but in a moment of inspiration Hansel cultivates Hedwig as a per- sona, and then uses this to his/her advantage as the lead performer of the transgendered punk- rock band The Angry Inch.10 It is important to note at this point that John Cameron Mitchell, a biological male who identi- fies as a gay man, conceived of Hedwig as a means of commenting on and challenging the norms of sex, gender, and sexuality—particularly the reifi- cation of normative binaries such as male/female and masculine/feminine—rather than as a way of advancing transgender politics, as that phrase is currently understood. Although Hedwig can be accurately described by the umbrella term “trans- gender,” the story that Mitchell intends to tell in Hedwig and the Angry Inch is not a conventional transgender narrative—that is, one arising out of an individual’s sense of gender dysphoria and predicated on a concomitant desire to transition from one normatively gendered or sexed identity (or body) to another. In other words, Hedwig and the Angry Inch is not a transgender narrative of the type that has become common in mainstream media in recent years, in films such as Normal (2003) and Transamerica (2005) or in television A One-Inch Mound of Flesh � Matthew Henry 67 series such as Orange is the New Black (2013-) and Transparent (2014-). Hedwig’s operation is one of expedience, done as a way to escape East Berlin, and Hedwig’s transbody is in effect acci- dental, a fact that does not comport with modern understandings of transidentities or contemporary transgender politics.11 Hedwig remains a decid- edly queer narrative, however, through its efforts to challenge dichotomous understandings of both sex and gender, accomplished in large part by employing what might be called a “drag queen aesthetic.” Mitchell knows that gender perfor- mance is both subversive and disruptive, provid- ing agency for nonconforming and queer individuals (as well as those who support them) and enabling them to actively destabilize hetero- sexist and essentialist norms. Hedwig’s liminal status as neither man nor woman—emphasized throughout the film by repeated references to the ambiguous and androgynous nature of Hedwig’s identity—furthers the subversive element, giving Hedwig and the Angry Inch an overtly political edge, thereby aligning it with the tradition of the New Queer Cinema. The Queer World of Hedwig John Cameron Mitchell and his musical collab- orator, Stephen Trask, originally met on a transat- lantic flight, and it was during the flight that Mitchell first shared the story of Hedwig, who at that point was merely an unnamed woman with a curious tale. Stephen Trask was then a member of the band Cheater, an “arty queer punk” band that performed at places like New York’s CBGB. In a fortuitous turn of events, Trask had been recently asked by promoter Michael Schmidt to provide a four-piece punk band to play back up music for drag performers at a new club called Squeezebox, where the specialty was going to be “rock-god- dess drag—Tina Turner, Patti Smith, Deborah Harry—instead of the stereotypical Barbara Strei- sand and Judy Garland routines” (Fricke 54). The gimmick was that the drag queens would actually sing the music rather than lip sync to the songs. Trask in turn invited Mitchell to come see the drag shows and then encouraged him to try out his own “drag character” on the audiences at the club. Hedwig made her first appearance at Squeezebox on July 24, 1994. Michael Ortega, then a Squeezebox hostess, recalls it as a “raw show,” one unique in the drag world because it told a complete story. Schmidt similarly says it was a “revelation” to see a drag character made into a “whole person” rather than a one-dimen- sional imitation, to see “someone who had a his- tory, who had a life” (Nix). What was also unique about Mitchell’s performance was that at the end of the show, in what became a signature element, he would rip off the drag persona. This type of “exposure” was unheard of in drag performances, for it shatters the illusion of identity and fore- grounds the essential performativity of drag and, by extension, of gender itself. Mitchell, energized by the initial responses to Hedwig, asked Trask to become a collaborator on the project and write songs for a full-scale “rock theater” piece to be called Hedwig and the Angry Inch. The stage version of Hedwig and the Angry Inch, produced for a mere $29,000, premiered in March of 1997 in an off-Broadway theater. Per- haps not surprisingly, the play did not do well at first. There was a rather slow response, and many people, not expecting such raw material in an uptown, off-Broadway theater setting, simply walked out. In retrospect, Mitchell believes the show was “too rock for the theater crowd and too queer for the rock crowd” (Nix). The producers thus went looking for another space and eventu- ally settled on a downtown site: the ballroom of the Hotel Riverview, which they transformed into the Jane Street Theater. After moving downtown, the play began to gain notoriety and, as word spread, a loyal following. Mitchell worked hard for this, performing seven shows per week for ten months straight. Ultimately exhausted from the experience, he departed, but the show continued with a variety of people in the lead role, in both the continuing New York run and the road shows.12 On the heels of the play’s increased suc- cess in its downtown venue, Mitchell was approached by New Line Cinema and indie film 68 The Journal of American Culture � Volume 39, Number 1 � March 2016 producer Christine Vachon about adapting the play for the big screen. Mitchell was initially reluctant, but he soon came to see it as an oppor- tunity to use film to explore elements of the story that were not feasible on stage. The film version of Hedwig and the Angry Inch appeared in 2001, and it quickly earned numerous awards and a loyal, cult-like following of fans, affectionately known as “Hed-heads.”13 Clearly, the film has spoken in an intimate way to many people. So, what is it about Hedwig that people find so intriguing? Part of the answer lies in the show’s origins in the glam-rock and punk- rock movements that inspired it. Nancy Rosen- blum characterizes it this way: “Hedwig is David Bowie, Boy George, Freddie Mercury, Lou Reed, and Iggy Pop all rolled into one blue-eyed sweetie with a biting sense of humor, a gift for song, and a trusting, broken heart” (26). Mitchell himself has also stated that “the rock and the drag were all mixed up already”; citing individuals such as Mick Jagger, David Bowie and Patti Smith, he further notes that “androgyny seems inextricable from rock” (Eliscu 29). Another way to understand the success and popularity of Hedwig is to consider it simply in cinematic terms; it is yet another aesthe- tically arousing and thematically provocative con- tribution to the corpus of queer film by producer Christine Vachon, who has an uncanny eye for great talent and seems to have, as Nancy Rosen- blum claims, “single-handedly created queer cin- ema” (26).14 Yet another way of answering the question is to point out Hedwig’s close ties to the gay community in New York, particularly its gen- esis in the drag-queen scene. However, doing so is perhaps a bit too limiting, as John Cameron Mitchell himself has acknowledged. In an inter- view with Mitchell in The Advocate, Bruce Steele asks: “If she was born at Squeezebox, is Hedwig a product of ‘gay culture’?” Mitchell replies: “Hed- wig uses drag conventions to sort of get through the tragedy of her life. But her main concern doesn’t involve sexuality—it was really about freedom and gender and identity and wholeness” (Steele 20). Perhaps the best approach to understanding Hedwig is to examine its philosophical underpin- nings and the ways in which Mitchell and Trask used philosophical concepts to create a deeply emotional story that could resonate with all audi- ences, straight, gay, or queer. In his assessment of the body of queer films produced in the years since La Cage aux Folles (1978) forged new ground, Michael Bronski highlights this philo- sophical element, claiming that the various incar- nations of “gender-bending” films “never approach the philosophical ambitions of Hedwig” (63). Tellingly, one of the first things Mitchell shared with Trask when they began to collaborate was The Symposium, Plato’s classic exegesis on the nature of love, as presented in a series of speeches given in praise of the god Eros. In partic- ular, Mitchell wanted Trask to read the story told by Aristophanes of the origins of human beings. This creation myth had been the origin of Mitch- ell’s own creation of Hedwig, whom he has described as “a walking metaphor for the myth” (Nix). In the story that Aristophanes relates in The Symposium, he posits a world in which there were originally three sexes: In the first place, there were three sexes among men, not two as now, male and female, but a third sex in addition, being both of them in common, whose name still remains though the thing itself has vanished; for one sex was then derived in common from both male and female, androgynous both in form and name. (Plato 189d-e) Aristophanes identifies these beings as the chil- dren of the Sun (male), the Earth (female), and the Moon (androgyne). According to the myth, these creatures challenged the gods and were then pun- ished by Zeus, who split them in two. Aristo- phanes thus defines Eros as the desire to reunite, to “make one from two” and achieve “whole- ness.” Interestingly, the myth provided a way to explain not only sex but sexual desire: Aristo- phanes’ story implies that humans are inherently either heterosexual or homosexual. Those severed from the children of the Sun “pursue the mascu- line,” hence the male, and are thus homosexual; those severed from the children of the Earth “pay scant heed to men, but are turned rather toward women, and lesbians come from this sex.” Those severed from the Moon, the “common sex, then called androgynous,” pursue the opposite sex and A One-Inch Mound of Flesh � Matthew Henry 69 are thus heterosexual (191d-e). Logically, then, if ones who had been severed from the Moon were able to reunite the severed halves, that individual would presumably be an androgynous being. This is an element of the myth that Mitchell latches onto and utilizes to great effect in exploring the ambiguous identity of Hedwig. The romantic notion of Eros offered by Aristophanes in The Symposium (i.e., love as the “pursuit of wholeness” with another) has had an enormous impact on Western culture, and it has shaped ideas about romance and love up to the current day. The concept of a “soul-mate,” for example, has great cogency in contemporary American culture—so much so that it is now both a clich�e and a part of our idiomatic language. Tra- ditionally, this romantic mythology has been read to mean that human beings, thinking ourselves incomplete, are “halves longing to meet the one and only one person who is our other half, so that in our union we may become whole” (Allen 33). Over time, however, the myth has been largely co-opted by the codes of the sex/gender system and heterosexuality, so much so that it is com- monly seen through a heteronormative lens and as applicable primarily to heterosexual relationships. Clearly, this is not so, and plenty of gay, lesbian, and queer individuals have believed themselves to be on that same quest for the elusive “soul-mate.” Nevertheless, even within gay and lesbian rela- tionships, heteronormative dichotomies are often employed—for example, the butch and femme roles adopted by many men and women—and since these roles rely heavily upon the traditional sex/gender system, they largely imitate existent binaries and thus reinscribe heteronormativity as a paradigm for romantic love. Moreover, as Wendy Hsu rightly points out, other “queer gen- der and sexuality identities,” such as transgender, transsexuality, and bisexuality, do not fit well with Aristophanes’ story, which is tied to bina- rism and thus “echoes with the heteronormative ideology and perceptions of gender and sexuality” (105). Like many people, Hedwig is initially condi- tioned by a heteronormative view of romantic love; she adopts the romantic myth as a truism and spends much of her time seeking to end her loneliness and achieve wholeness with her “other half” in a series of relationships with three very different men: Luther, Tommy, and Yitzhak.15 Hedwig’s faith in the romantic myth is demon- strated in the film in a number of ways, although primarily in the performance of the song “The Origin of Love,” which appears early in the narra- tive. At the conclusion of the song, the audience sees Hedwig and Yitzhak, cuddled together in bed, and hears in voice over Hedwig ruminating on the concept of Eros: It is clear that I must find my other half. But is it a he or a she? What does this person look like? Identical to me? Or somehow complementary? Does my other half have what I don’t? Did he get the looks? The luck? The Love? . . . What about sex? Is that how …