Gender Fluidity In 'Hedwig And The Angry Inch'

1505 Words4 Pages

Hedwig and the Angry Inch is a rock musical centered on a confused individual named Hedwig. Her plight grows out of a botched sex change operation. She ended up with neither the working penis she had to begin with, nor the working vagina she had been attempting to gain. However, Hedwig, by nature, is neither completely male nor completely female, even when she had fully functioning male genitalia. Instead, she is something called gender fluid. John Cameron Mitchell, by writing a character that is gender fluid such as Hedwig, destroys the gender binary in order to illustrate that by avoiding polarizing concepts like male and female characters, stories can explore a more diverse range of human experiences.
Gender fluidity is what’s known as a gender identity. According to Dictionary.com, the word refers “to a person whose gender identity or gender expression is not fixed and shifts over time or depending on the situation.” Gender fluidity is an identity that exsists outside the conventional gender binary of man and woman or male and female. While, gender and gender identity are, admittedly, very complicated concepts, society is actively trying to figure out and define them. While the notion of Hedwig status as a gender fluid …show more content…

When Luther comes across young Hansel and sees him lying, face down and naked, he initially mistakes Hansel for a woman. Hansel doesn’t correct Luther. Rather, he simply stands up, revealing his penis, and states, “my name is Hansel”. While Luther seems surprised at misidentifying Hansel’s sex, Hansel doesn’t seem to care. This strikes the story’s listener as odd. Most individuals would at least be taken a bit aback at being misgendered. Hansel doesn’t even mention it. In fact, he’s largely silent on the issue. It can be assumed that this is due to Hansel not having a strong attachment to the gender that he was assigned at

Show More
Related

  • Hedwig and the Angry Inch

    1986 Words  | 4 Pages

    A large portion of contemporary film and theatre has been lacking in substance. More often than not, we are presented with a “been there, seen that” scenario. One such exception to this rule is Hedwig and the Angry Inch, a film by John Cameron Mitchell that was released in 2001. Set primarily in post-Cold War America, Hedwig is a film that characteristically breaks convention. Our story follows Hedwig, a forgotten and confused homo…trans…well, human being. Growing up in East Berlin during the Cold War, Hansel Schmidt (John Cameron Mitchell) lives what I would call a horrible childhood in the bleak landscape of communist occupied Germany. He falls in love with an American soldier, and undergoes a sex change in order to marry him and leave East Berlin. The operation is botched, leaving him/her as a physical contradiction. Not quite a man, but not yet a woman, Hansel (now Hedwig) has what she describes as an “angry inch.” When describing it in lighter terms, she calls it a “Barbie doll crotch.” Upon arriving in America, the soldier leaves her the same day the Berlin wall comes down. Destroyed, Hedwig spends some time discovering her new self and eventually finds a soul mate in a young boy named Tommy Speck (Michael Pitt). They collaborate musically and romantically, but upon discovering Hedwig’s secret he leaves with all of their music. He becomes a huge rock star, living Hedwig’s dream while simultaneously leaving her in the dust. From then on, Hedwig and her band “The Angry Inch” follow Tommy as he tours the nation while Hedwig tries desperately to gain the notoriety she deserves for her music. Viewing this film through the lens of a feminist gender perspective, I find that Hedwig is a pioneer on the forefront of changing the gende...

    Read More

  • Hedwig And The Angry Inch Stereotypes

    1883 Words  | 4 Pages

    Here, the film refers to an abstract separation between people that explains the emptiness most individuals search to fill by looking for their “other half”. However, the completed tattoo on Hedwig’s side in the final scene of the film presents the split during the “Origin of Love” being rejoined to make one whole (1:26:00). Hence, when Hedwig walks away bare and naked she seems to realize that she is complete in herself and that she does not need all the hair and makeup and anger to make her who she is. Additionally, there are hints that Hedwig no longer identifies as either male or female because she walks away from the camera and away from the camera audience who symbolize the societal projections that were brought to the forefront during her “wig in a box” transformation. Therefore, because she is walking away from us and not singing angrily at us it seems that she has reached a moment of self-actualization where she is comfortable with authentically being herself despite what the audience might think. In effect, Hedwig’s bareness indicates her authenticity and conveys that she has reached a moment of self-actualization and sex recognition that does not conform to the common gender

    Read More

  • Judging a Book by Its Cover: Similarities in Rawi Hage´s Cockroach and Judy Ruzylo´s Documnetary the Order of Thing

    925 Words  | 2 Pages

    ..., for example, “gender is either boy or girl”; “you cannot change what you already are”. Accordingly, Hage and Ruzylo are trying to explain that no matter what there will always be people judging a unique or different person; this judgement can later cause the homosexual and transgendered people to be stuck between two different genders. Stephanie from the documentary explains; “when ordering something at a store while wearing a dress, they still call me sir or Mr.” Even though she wants to be treated as a woman and she even changed her appearance to be viewed as a woman, people are still determined that she is a man. The public’s confusion makes the transgender lose her identity; there is nothing more she can do to prove that she is a woman. Furthermore, the young boy says that people would call him “she, he, they” because they are not sure of what they are seeing.

    Read More

  • Gender Criticism In The Kite Runner

    1189 Words  | 3 Pages

    As children grow up they are always expected to be a certain way. Some children are expected to better than their parents or some to be just as “perfect” as they were. While reading the novel The Kite Runner written by Khaled Hosseini uses the theme of always being expected who to be played a lot in the book. Amir, the main character grew up in a wealthy home in Afghanistan with his father Baba. Gender Criticism was played out a lot throughout the book because Amir next to his father is too completely different people personality wise. Amir always wanted to do the right thing to have his father be happy led him to eventually betray someone who truly cared for him.

    Read More

  • The Representation of Gender in the Films Bend it Like Beckham and Billy Elliot

    1448 Words  | 3 Pages

    do ballet and if they do then they must be gay. In Bend it like

    Read More

  • Gender Roles in Alice Munro’s Boys and Girls

    1095 Words  | 3 Pages

    In Alice Munro’s short story “Boys and Girls,” our narrator is a young farm girl on the verge of puberty who is learning what it means to be a “girl.” The story shows the differing gender roles of boys and girls – specifically that women are the weaker, more emotional sex – by showing how the adults of the story expect the children to grow into their respective roles as a girl and a boy, and how the children grow up and ultimately begin to fulfill these roles, making the transition from being “children” to being “young adults.”

    Read More

  • Gender Roles in Society

    2016 Words  | 5 Pages

    The clusters of social definitions used to identify persons by gender are collectively known as “femininity” and “masculinity.” Masculine characteristics are used to identify persons as males, while feminine ones are used as signifiers for femaleness. People use femininity or masculinity to claim and communicate their membership in their assigned, or chosen, sex or gender. Others recognize our sex or gender more on the basis of these characteristics than on the basis of sex characteristics, which are usually largely covered by clothing in daily life.

    Read More

  • Gender And Gender Roles In Monsters, Inc.

    1815 Words  | 4 Pages

    Nominated for three Academy Awards and winner of Best Original Song (IMDb, n.d), Monsters, Inc. is “well-liked by many” thus qualifying as an example of popular cinema (Storey, 2001). Produced by Pete Doctor and David Silverman, Monsters, Inc. tells the tale of two monsters, Mike and Sully, who both work at a utility company called Monsters, Inc(operated), where children’s screams are harvested as power. One night, Sully stayed late as a favor to Mike to finish his paperwork and noticed a door left on the scare floor. The door was left by Randal- a very competitive co-worker, who planned to kidnap the child to test his ‘scream machine’ that sucks the screams out of children at a much more efficient rate than scaring them. Just as Sully was

    Read More

  • Don H. Zimmerman's Theory Of Gender

    1822 Words  | 4 Pages

    West and Zimmerman define gender as, “the performance of activities and actions that derive from the chosen sex category a person identifies with (29).” This would mean that an individual who chooses to identify as a female such as Agnes would have to keep up with that identity permanently throughout day to day interactions; rather, than a facade, or two faced person who displays themselves differently in the public and domestic spheres. Since this theory focuses on social interaction, it can be questioned if gender identity is then fixed or flexible? Considering everyday interactions, no two conversations a group of people may have will be the “exact same,” in the same way one can say that yes gender is a fixed trait, but it is also flexible. Keeping in mind that culture and society is always changes and bound to adapt to new situations, what was considered a fixed gender at a certain point in an individual’s life may change over time. for example, women within many societies and cultures be in western, Asian, middle eastern or native were seen as the home makers and housewives who remained within the domestic sphere, today this ideology has changed where there are more women in the workforce in comparison to earlier generations as well as the opposite gender. Flexibility is seen through the fact that although a woman may have her share within domestics, she may also hold a

    Read More

  • Transgender Identity Essay

    963 Words  | 2 Pages

    Cisgender, for example, is the word that describes when your gender identity aligns with your sex. It is the reverse of transgender. Most people identify as cisgender or 'cis' without even recognizing it, but it is a gender identity, too.

    Read More

  • Gender Roles In Beauty And The Beast Analysis

    1539 Words  | 4 Pages

    the Beast has really lost his beastliness and regular wishes; maybe the energy has been

    Read More

  • Feminism In Peter Pan

    1411 Words  | 3 Pages

    Women are crucial to society. They are our voices, and they revolutionize our people. More importantly, mothers are a big part of our society. J.M Barrie’s Peter Pan is a magic-filled story about a mischievous young boy named Peter, and his tribe, the Lost Boys, who explore and go from raising themselves to attaining a mother. This story can be studied under the lens of the Feminist Critical Theory, which focuses on women empowerment and their outstanding role in society. Literature allows society to explore this role, which J.M Barrie displays impeccably in his book. Barrie’s book definitively presents Wendy’s journey from childhood to motherhood, her role in the development of Peter and the Lost Boys, and the idealization of women. Peter

    Read More

  • Argumentative Essay On Transgender Today

    1012 Words  | 3 Pages

    Clinically speaking, a person who was assigned female at birth but identifies and lives as a man is referred to as a transsexual man, or transman, or female-to-male (FTM); a male-to-female (MTF) person is a transsexual woman or transwoman (Glicksman). Some people drop the transgender label after they have transitioned to their new gender. However, they want to be referred to only as a man or a woman. But what if our gender identity, our sense of being a boy or being a girl, does not match our physical body? From a very early age we will start to feel increasingly uncomfortable. For some this is a mild discomfort, for others it is so traumatic they would rather die than continue to live in the wrong body. Unfortunately as transsexual people are a small minority of the population the condition has been labeled by Psychiatrists as "Gender Identity Disorder". With the transgendered, the disordered assumption is that the

    Read More

  • Point Of Equality Analysis

    368 Words  | 1 Pages

    They are people who are born with characteristics of both sexes, including chromosomes, hormones, or genitals. Additionally, more and more people like to label themselves as transsexual, genderqueer, genderfluid or non-binary, which are not legally accepted genders (or lack thereof).

    Read More

  • Gender Neutral Bathrooms: Transgender Rights And Gender Neutral Bathrooms

    1179 Words  | 3 Pages

    For example, someone who is gender fluid is described to "feel like a mix of the two traditional genders, but may feel more man some days, and more woman other days." Killerman. It is very difficult for people who do not "pass" as a specific gender to use the restroom in public. This is not an issue solely felt by transgender people. People who don't identify as the gender they were assigned at birth can face many kinds of discrimination and harassment.

    Read More

More about Gender Fluidity In 'Hedwig And The Angry Inch'

Open Document