Gender, Place & Culture

A Journal of Feminist Geography

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Transnational ways of seeing: sexual and national

belonging in Hedwig and the Angry Inch

Jillian Sandell

To cite this article: Jillian Sandell (2010) Transnational ways of seeing: sexual and national
belonging in Hedwig and the Angry Inch , Gender, Place & Culture, 17:2, 231-247, DOI:
10.1080/09663691003600322

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/09663691003600322

Published online: 18 Mar 2010.

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Gender, Place and Culture
Vol. 17, No. 2, April 2010, 231–247

Transnational ways of seeing: sexual and national belonging in Hedwig

and the Angry Inch
Jillian Sandell*

Department of Women and Gender Studies, San Francisco State University, 1600 Holloway Avenue,
San Francisco, CA 94132

I argue that transnational ways of seeing help us apprehend the histories of

globalization, immigration and imperialism that frame and make legible cultural
productions. Focusing on John Cameron Mitchell’s 2001 film Hedwig and the Angry
Inch, which has been almost universally received as being about transsexuality, this
essay argues that the film is equally about transnationality and specifically about how
queer identifications and identities are produced in relation to the nation-state. Hedwig
explores the limits of national belonging and the pleasures of US popular culture
through the lens of sexual and gender identity, with the ambiguity of the Hedwig’s
body embodying confusion about legal, political and cultural citizenship. The film
identifies and critiques the violences of heteronormative national belonging, yet by
reading Hedwig alongside the political and legal histories that make its narrative
legible, it becomes apparent that the film’s popular reception frequently erases the
transnational and imperial histories that undergird and produce sexual identities and
identification. I argue that cultural practices do not simply reflect national or queer
identifications but also produce them. The fissures between the cultural work of the film
itself and of its circulation illustrate how despite the mutual imbrication of sexuality
and nationality, transsexuality is sometimes more readily apprehended than is
transnationality.
Keywords: transnational feminist cultural studies; Hedwig and the Angry Inch;
cultural citizenship

Introduction
Transnational ways of seeing make visible and produce subjects who can apprehend, the
global linkages that precede and make possible territorial formations produced under the
sign of the nation-state. Popular culture is central to these processes. John Berger (1972)
coined the phrase ‘ways of seeing’ to argue that visual representations do not only depict
images, they also produce looking relations and subject positions for audiences and
viewers. Key to his analysis was an understanding that viewing practices are produced
within, and in turn reproduce, social relations based on gender, race, sexuality and nation.
Bringing a transnational focus to Berger’s well-known formulation and relying on Marx’s
distinction between the ‘visible’ and the ‘seeable’, I argue that what we see – and what we
apprehend about what we see in popular culture – is an historical and geopolitical, not
merely physiological, experience.1 I use the term ‘apprehend’ because its multiple
meanings – to grasp the importance of something, to arrest somebody, to sense something,
and to await an impending disaster with dread – capture the simultaneous acts of cognitive

*Email: sandell@sfsu.edu

ISSN 0966-369X print/ISSN 1360-0524 online

q 2010 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/09663691003600322
http://www.informaworld.com
232 J. Sandell

understanding and affective anxiety that shape such moments of recognition, along with
the uneven ways in which such knowledges are deployed. To apprehend is not just to
understand a fact or piece of information but also to understand its significance; to
comprehend the relationship between knowledge and power. I argue that transnational
knowledges are frequently found in moments of translation and for this reason we must
attend to the modes of reception as well as of production. Using a transnational feminist
cultural studies methodology and John Cameron Mitchell’s 2001 film Hedwig and the
Angry Inch as my central text, I argue that transnational ways of seeing make visible
the uneven effects of, and relationship among, immigration, globalization and
transnationalism. By transnational feminist cultural studies, I refer to a methodology
articulated through a series of essays by Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan that analyze
the social and political significance of cultural practices produced within the context of
globalization and that critically engage the category of the nation-state (Grewal and
Kaplan 1994 and 2001; Kaplan and Grewal 1999). Part of the social and political
significance of Hedwig, I argue, is that the visibility of and relationship between sexuality
and nationality are unevenly apprehended.
Opening with a punk version of ‘America the Beautiful’ and the words ‘Yankee Go
Home . . . With Me’ emblazoned on the protagonist’s cape, John Cameron Mitchell’s
Hedwig and the Angry Inch is an ambivalent appraisal of what it means to become
American. Beginning in 1988 as a short performance piece in Squeezebox, a drag
performance space in New York, continuing as an off-Broadway stage play beginning on
Valentine’s Day 1998, and culminating in 2001 as a popular and critically-acclaimed film,
Hedwig explores the limits of national belonging and the pleasures of United States popular
culture through the lens of sexual and gender identity, with the ambiguity of Hedwig’s
body embodying confusion about legal, political and cultural citizenship. Though the film
has been widely – almost universally – received as being about transsexuality (Ebert 2001;
Ehrenstein 2001; Harvey 2001; Holden 2001; Jones 2006; Leland 2001; Marks 2001;
Meyer 2001; Taubin 2001; Travers 2001; Zacharek 2001), I argue that it is equally about
transnationality and specifically about how queer identifications and identities are both
produced and regulated in relation to the nation-state. The film’s reception overwhelmingly
names the subject matter as queer sexuality (described alternately, sometimes within the
same review, as transgender, transsexual or gay), and sometimes minimizes the focus on
sexuality to argue that the film has ‘universal’ appeal.2 The film identifies and critiques the
violences of heteronormative national belonging, yet the film’s reception frequently
delinks the sexual from the national, erasing the transnational and imperial histories that
undergird and produce sexual identities and identification.3 Similarly, though the film’s
Eastern European protagonist disrupts monolithic notions of ‘Europeanness’, or of what
counts as ‘European’ (Pieterse 1994), debates about the film often erase the specificity of
Hedwig’s East German past and of the differential status of the ‘second world’ in relation to
immigration. Debates about gender and feminism in relation to Eastern Europe often
challenge familiar binaries of North/South and West/East (Cerwonka 2008; Imre 2005b;
Marciniak 2005; Marciniak et al 2007; Roman 2006), and Hedwig illustrates this tension.
This essay argues that cultural practices do not simply reflect national or queer
identifications but also produce them. By reading Hedwig alongside the political and legal
histories that makes its narrative legible, I emphasize the importance of transnational ways
of seeing in the circulation as well as production of cultural texts.
Hedwig suggests that music becomes a vehicle for the expression and production of
national–sexual identifications and disidentifications. The film is a glam-punk-rock musical
about Hedwig (John Cameron Mitchell), born a boy named Hansel (Ben Mayer-Goodman)
 Gender, Place and Culture 233

in Berlin in 1961, the year the Berlin wall is built. The son of a German mother and American
GI father, Hansel lives in East Berlin and falls in love with Lt. Luther Robinson (Maurice Dean
Witt), an American GI stationed in West Berlin. In order to move to the West, Hansel
undergoes gender reassignment surgery so he can become Hedwig, marry Luther and
emigrate as Luther’s spouse. The unsuccessful operation leaves Hedwig with the ‘angry inch’
of the film’s title and an ambiguously-gendered body. The present day of the film is set in the
US, where Hedwig tours the country with her rock band, ‘The Angry Inch’, comprised of
various foreign nationals, including Hedwig’s second husband Yitzhak, a Jewish male
Eastern European drag queen, played by a woman (Miriam Shor),4 who is dependent on
Hedwig for his green card. On a tour that follows arena-rock star and Hedwig’s former
boyfriend Tommy Gnosis (Michael Pitt), Hedwig tells her life-story through flashbacks and a
series of concerts at the Bilgewater chain of restaurants.5
This plot summary does little justice to the complexity of the film’s narrative and
formal structure, which has layers of references juxtaposing Plato and Lilith Fair, Kant and
the Rolling Stones, lowbrow and elite culture, and military and national histories. In my
discussion below, I focus on the way that the film depicts the heteronormative regulation
of US citizenship and how this relates to the transmission and translation of ‘American’
culture globally. It is important to emphasize that Hedwig and the Angry Inch does not
realistically depict queer subjectivity in the German Democratic Republic during the Cold
War (or in the United States after the Cold War); rather, it depicts from a US perspective
how East German queer subjectivity is imagined and produced in relation to the US
military presence in West Germany.6 Though John Cameron Mitchell lived in West Berlin
with his military family during his teenage years and visited East Berlin many times, his
representation of Hansel/Hedwig’s life and of the Cold War is filtered through what Anikó
Imre (2005, xii) calls in another context the ‘epistemological parameters of the Cold War
order’: Eastern European culture is evaluated from the perspective of the West, favoring
those representations that oppose totalitarian regimes. Western media representations of
Eastern Europe do not only represent events, albeit from a limited range of perspectives,
but also shape them. Yosefa Loshitzky (1997, 281) argues, for example, that the western
media did not just depict the fall of the Berlin Wall but also functioned as ‘catalysts’ to the
events they represented. In this way Hedwig and the Angry Inch contributes to a broader
history of western cultural representations of Eastern Europe that allows an examination of
how the Cold War is written into US-based histories and which illustrates how cultural
practices are an important site for shaping national identities and memories.
Hedwig instantiates the gendered and sexed limits of national belonging and the
gendered and sexed pleasures of US popular culture, deploying what José Esteban Muñoz
(1999) calls ‘disidentification’ to provisionally resolve these limits. For Muñoz (1999,
11 –12), disidentification is a strategy that ‘works on and against dominant ideology . . .
[and] that tries to transform the cultural logic from within, always laboring to enact
permanent structural change while at the same time valuing the importance of local or
everyday struggles of resistance’. Disidentification names and provides a mechanism to
resolve the ambivalent experiences of desire and resistance toward what the film names as
the ‘American idiom’, articulated through both culture and the law. As Lisa Lowe (1996,
2) argues, for example, ‘Although the law is perhaps the discourse that most literally
governs citizenship, US national culture – the collectively forged images, histories, and
narratives that place, displace, and replace individuals in relation to the national polity –
powerfully shapes who the citizenry is, where they dwell, what they remember, and what
they forget’. With this relationship between culture and law in mind, Hedwig and the
Angry Inch highlights three processes at work: US cultural imperialism creates desire for
234 J. Sandell

US culture and US citizenship; US immigration law delimits the ideal American citizen
and produces unevenly available forms of cultural and legal citizenship; and US
immigrants do not simply get reshaped by American ideologies but also actively reshape
what counts as ‘American’, drawing attention to the fact that the US is what Arjun
Appadurai (1996, 172) calls a ‘transnation’, meaning the form taken by nations like the US
that are thoroughly constituted by global flows of people, capital and ideas. As Kandice
Chuh (1996, 94) argues, however, ‘It is important to underscore the history of coercion
embedded in the very notion of the transnation’, which in the case of Hedwig means
attending to the military traffic that precedes and accompanies cultural traffic. Hedwig
exemplifies the connections between the apparently opposing desires and limits of national
belonging. In some cases, John Cameron Mitchell and Stephen Trask – the film’s authors
– explicitly make these claims. In other cases, they do not. I argue that the film depicts the
heteronormative production of legal and cultural citizenship through music and song.7
Indeed, these generic elements are crucial to how the film structures its moments of queer
and national identification and disidentification.

‘A touch of home’
Hedwig suggests that US military bases in Germany create desire for US popular culture
and become a technology of queer and national identification. Indeed, Germany hosts the
largest number of foreign US military facilities.8 This overseas US military presence is
accompanied by a significant cultural presence: soldiers and military personnel bring with
them their cultural attitudes, beliefs, behaviors and products, and the military provides
soldiers stationed overseas with American Forces Network (AFN), radio and television
programming designed and made available by the military. Accordingly, as a child in East
Berlin, Hansel’s cultural and political formation is shaped by AFN through ambivalent
identification. Born in 1961, the year the wall was built, Hansel only ever experiences
Berlin as a divided city. Hedwig tells us that while most other Germans fled to the West
when the Berlin Wall was built, her mother instead packed up their things and moved them
east. The film depicts Hansel’s childhood with the by now standard western tropes of Cold
War Eastern Europe: a visually cramped apartment, a politically repressive environment
and a culturally drab landscape. It is in this context that Hedwig reflects on her childhood
in East Berlin and reminisces that, ‘most of my time was spent listening to American
Forces Radio’. What the film makes visible is US cultural traffic; what makes that cultural
traffic possible, however, is the less-visible prior military traffic. Hedwig’s desire emerges
out of and responds to the US military and cultural presence in West Germany.
American Forces Radio came into existence on 4 July 1943 for American servicemen
stationed in England during World War II.9 This auspiciously patriotic date was no
accident; as Patrick Morely (2001, 30) argues, preparations had been underway for months
and they waited for 4 July for the inaugural transmission, which opened with ‘The Star
Spangled Banner’. Because US servicemen missed American radio, General George
Marshall, the Army chief of staff in Washington, and General Dwight D. Eisenhower,
commander in chief of the European Theater of Operations, agreed that American troops
abroad should have the same radio service they got at home (Morely 2001, 2 –8). Head of
Special Forces Division Frank Capra emphasized the importance of soldier morale,
claiming as his mission, ‘we want them to know we care’ (Morely 2001, 63). The official
announcement in Stars and Stripes called American Forces Network a ‘back home’ radio
station (Morely 2001, 26 – 30), anticipating today’s claim by the American Forces Radio
and Television Service (AFRTS) that they provide American troops serving abroad with
 Gender, Place and Culture 235

‘a touch of home’ (AFRTS Fact Sheet 2009). Within two years, there was the first AFN
station in Germany, with its 8 June 1945 inaugural broadcast opening with the by
now traditional playing of ‘The Star Spangled Banner’. AFN flourished in Germany,
ultimately becoming the largest part of AFN’s overseas operations (Craig 1986, Morley
2001, 128 – 35). Insofar as the military and cultural presence provides Americans abroad
and its local audiences with a ‘touch of home’, it functions as a form of cultural
imperialism: the US political, economic and cultural power travels beyond its nation-state
boundaries and impacts previous social arrangements. Within the film, Mitchell suggests
that everyone who listens to AFN will want to travel to the US.
Though the prime directive of AFN may be to provide culturally familiar music and
news to Americans abroad, it does not only reach Americans. Rather, since its inaugural
transmission there has been a significant ‘shadow audience’ that listens to AFN alongside
the American servicemen (Craig 1986). During World War II, more British than
Americans listened to AFN, for example (Morley 2001, 48). AFN might bring a ‘touch of
home’ to Americans abroad, but it equally makes ‘American culture’ part of the foreign
‘home’. Shadow audiences are possible because radio transmissions cannot be entirely
restricted by location. Indeed, Hedwig demonstrates what Doreen Massey (1994, 149)
calls the ‘power geometry’ of mobility associated with globalization. Massey
distinguishes between voluntary and involuntary mobility of different groups of people,
as well as the multiple ways that cultures often travel more freely than do the people who
produce them. For example, shadow audiences in East Berlin listen to AFN intended for
American soldiers stationed in West Berlin; North American rock stars do not necessarily
visit Berlin, but their music is played on the radio; Hansel may want to go to the US but his
body is not as mobile as his identifications.10 As a child in the 1970s listening to AFN,
Hansel learns to love what, as Hedwig, she retroactively calls ‘the American idiom’.
Describing the cramped apartment he shared with his mother, so cramped that he must
play inside the oven, Hedwig recalls,
Late at night I would listen to the voices of the American Masters: Toni Tenille, Debby
Boone, Anne Murray – who was actually a Canadian working in the American idiom.
And then there were the crypto-homo-rockers: Lou Reed, Iggy Pop, David Bowie – who was
actually an idiom working in America and Canada. These artists left as deep an impression on
me as that oven rack did on my face.
This catalogue of white 1970s glam rock stars alongside balladeers conflates different
kinds of cathexis: desire for sexual ambiguity, desire for Anglo-North American music,
and a desire for US citizenship.11 The range of musical genres Hedwig invokes – from
Anne Murray’s Canadian country pop to David Bowie’s English bisexual chic rock to Iggy
Pop’s American proto-punk – refuse any single musical genealogy and instead reference
the many styles that inform Hedwig’s rock musical structure. Notably, they are not all
‘American’, yet their national differences are subsumed musically, racially and sexually
as part of the white queer American musical idiom with which Hedwig disidentifies.
By claiming these musicians of different nationalities under the sign ‘American Masters’,
Hedwig reinforces what Inderpal Grewal (2005) in a different context calls the practices of
‘transnational America’. Grewal argues that the ‘idea’ of America travels through
consumer practices beyond the territorial boundaries of the US and that prospective
migrants become ‘American’ before entering the territory of the US. Linking these
moments of identification to Foucault’s (2000 [1978]) notion of governmentality and
connecting the workings of ‘biopolitics’ with ‘geopolitics’, Grewal (2005, 2) argues that
American national identity functions ‘as a mechanism that combined biopower with
apparatuses of governmentality to produce discourses and practices of freedom and
236 J. Sandell

choice – yet these discourses and practices had older imperial histories and newer
disciplinary formations that were also recuperated in new ways’. Hedwig’s sex-
reassignment surgery thus exemplifies the link between biopolitics and geopolitics, where
individuals govern and regulate themselves to conform to geopolitical demands, in this a
case immigration law. AFN brings not only American music to foreign countries – and
specifically western music to Eastern Europe – but also the idea of and desire for America.
This desire is also a queer desire, exemplifying how, as Judith Peraino argues (2003,
2006), music (including song and lyrics) is an important cultural form to represent and
mediate queer desire and subjectivity.
The slippage between cultural and political desire underwrites Hedwig, implying that
US cultural imperialism creates a desire for US citizenship. As an adult reflecting on his
enjoyment of glam rock as a child listening to AFN, Hedwig sees this pleasure as a
moment of prolepsis.12 Hedwig muses that her childhood was shaped by both cultural
influences (the ‘American masters’ she heard on AFN) and material circumstances
(‘the oven’ in which she played). This trope of playing inside the oven is, as Jordy Jones
(2006, 452) points out, ‘a macabre reenactment of German fairy tales and holocaust
history’. As Jones suggests, the film is haunted by the history of Holocaust. The Berlin
Wall, for example, has come to symbolize more than just a Cold War demarcation between
East and West; it is also, according to Loshitzky (1997, 286 – 7), an ‘unintended’ war
memorial for the Holocaust. Berlin thus simultaneously embodies the utopian and
dystopian elements of the Enlightenment: Berlin was a cultural capital and space of
progressive thought, and it was also the political capital of the Third Reich and symbol of
the Nazi regime (1997, 283). Through these contradictions, the Berlin Wall permits a
symbolic conflation of the different material realities of the Cold War and World War II.
Hedwig’s journey to the US is thus figured as a move through both space and time.
The prominence of ‘crypto-homo-rockers’ in Mitchell’s fictional AFN playlist
emphasizes that while the US military considers homosexuality ‘incompatible’ with the
military, US popular culture frequently embraces queer performers.13 As the son of
General Speck, Tommy Gnosis represents this tension. The ‘gnosis’ of his name is the
knowledge about sexuality that he simultaneously acknowledges and refuses. Tommy
Gnosis is seduced by the idea of Hedwig, but only so long as he is able to avoid facing
the reality of her body: he rejects her when he is forced to confront her ‘angry inch’.
Her sexually ambiguous culture is appealing and visible but her sexually ambiguous
body is not.
Though AFN provides a ‘touch of home’ to Americans serving abroad, this does not
make ‘abroad’ part of the ‘home’ of the US. The pithy imperative ‘Yankee Go Home!’
contains centuries of resistance to US imperialism: though the term ‘Yankee’ comes from
the Civil War, signifying northerners who were loyal to the union, since the nineteenth
century it has signified ‘American’ more generally, especially to those outside the US.
The phrase accompanies US military presence around the world and emphasizes that
though these countries are where Americans are living, they are not the Americans’
‘home’. This usefully reminds us that we should not conflate a desire for the US culture
that accompanies a US military presence with desire for a US military presence. Playing
on the familiarity of this phrase, and fully cognizant of the history of American
imperialism around the world, Hedwig subverts this demand by adding ‘with me’ to create
a double-entendre: inviting the American solider to ‘go home with me tonight’, and even
‘take me back to your country’, dissolving the difference between ‘home’ and ‘country’.
Simultaneously acknowledging and undercutting the legacy of US imperialism around
the world, Hedwig draws attention to the uneven sexual and gender power relations
 Gender, Place and Culture 237

between US servicemen and women stationed abroad and the citizens of their host
countries, power relations that have reverberations for her ‘back home’. Once on the army
base in Kansas, for example, Hedwig finds work babysitting for the son of General Speck,
becoming part of the domestic and sexual economy that surrounds the army base, an
economy that, as Cynthia Enloe (1989, 1993, 2000) and others have argued, is an unevenly
gendered effect of US global militarism. Indeed, Hedwig’s first back-up band comprises
Korean military wives living in Junction City, Kansas, illustrating the connections
between the US military presence during the Korean War, the immigration of ‘war brides’
(Takaki 1989, 417); the heterosexual logic of military couplings; and the fact that
migrations to the US are often the result of displacement and wars around the world.

‘To be free you must give up a little part of yourself’

US family and naturalization laws presume heterosexuality. As such, Hansel cannot enter
the US as Lt. Luther Robinson’s spouse; he must become Hedwig and enter as Luther’s
female wife. When Hedwig’s mother says to Hansel, ‘to be free you must give up a little
part of yourself’, she not only echoes western social contract theory, a foundation of liberal
democracy, but also references more generally the costs that national belonging exacts.14
Within the western liberal democratic tradition of citizenship that Hedwig hopes to join,
the ‘social contract’ presumes a universal citizen, a category that reinforces rather than
erases gender, racial and sexual hierarchies.15 By assuming a ‘universal’ rather than
specific citizen, ‘citizenship’ has historically been an exclusionary category that rather
than being able to accommodate differences of gender, race, sexuality, ethnicity, religion
or other axes of power and identification (Alexander 1994, 2005; Brandzel 2005; Cruz-
Malavé and Manalsanan 2002; Lister 1997; Somerville 2005; Yuval-Davis 1997). In other
words, the social contract is a mechanism of exclusion as much as inclusion: as M. Jacqui
Alexander (1994) puts it, ‘not just any body can be a citizen’. Marriage is a key mechanism
by which the nation polices its borders and heterosexuality is one of the unspoken norms of
national membership (Alexander 2005; Brandzel 2005). Since national belonging implies
heteronormativity, in order to enter the US Hansel must undergo gender reassignment
surgery and become Hedwig. As the song ‘The Angry Inch’ makes clear, however,
Hansel’s surgery is neither freely chosen (‘they dragged me to the doctor one day’), nor
successful (‘my sex change operation got botched’). The violence is thus not of gender
reassignment surgery in general – which can be voluntary and desirable – but rather of the
regulative and failed version Hedwig experiences in order to immigrate. The ‘angry inch’
of the song and film title, the physical legacy of Hedwig’s botched surgery, is a constant
reminder of this national –sexual policing.
Hedwig’s ambivalent identification reveals the tensions between what Renato Rosaldo
(1994) calls ‘legal’ and ‘cultural citizenship’, or the difference between having a passport
to, and actually being part of the cultural imaginary of, a nation. Hedwig has ‘become’
American in part because, as Grewal argues, the transnational circulation of the ‘idea’ of
America travels and produces desire for and familiarity with American cultures and
practices. Hedwig’s identification with the ‘American idiom’ is facilitated through her
whiteness and her cultural citizenship is confirmed by the genealogy of visual and textual
references that she makes. But her legal and political belonging exacts a high price:
botched surgery, relinquished nationality and a broken heart. The broken heart combines
two misfortunes: Luther leaves Hedwig within months of arriving in the US in 1988; and
exactly a year after their wedding in East Berlin, the Berlin Wall comes down. While she
watches on television the city of Berlin reunite, Hedwig knows there is no such resolution
238 J. Sandell

for her body. The power of this moment, however, depends upon a conflation of national
and sexual identities. This scene implies that Hansel could have waited and immigrated to
the West on his own after the end of the Cold War: that the tragedy lies in having given up
his white male privilege or that he had to exchange his male privilege for white privilege.
However, in the US, 1967’s Boutilier v. Immigration Service made homosexuality a
condition that denied eligibility for immigration and naturalization, and though
homosexuality was removed from the Immigration and Naturalization Act in 1990,
American citizens were not then nor are currently allowed to sponsor same-sex spouses or
partners (Somerville 2005, 347 – 8). As Siobhan Somerville argues, a consideration of the
1967 case of Boutilier v. Immigration Service alongside the 1969 case of Loving v.
Virginia, which overturned US anti-miscegenation legislation and secured marriage as a
‘fundamental right’, reveals how citizenship rights presume heteronormativity. When
Luther, who is African American, entices Hansel, who is white, with multicolored Gummy
Bears ‘of every race and creed’, the comparison Hansel draws with the ‘bland’ Gummi
Bären of East Germany positions the US as the multicultural nation of racial diversity –
and the US military as the signifier of this multiculturalism (McAlister 2001, 235– 65) –
papering over the ways that this diversity is regulated within a heteronormative logic. Like
Yitzhak, Luther is not a fully realized character but instead functions primarily to enable
the development of Hedwig’s own narrative (Jones 2006, 460). But Hedwig’s Eastern
European queer whiteness forecloses any easy immigration to the US. Luther and Hansel’s
marriage is impossible not because they are an interracial couple but because they are an
interracial same-sex couple. Hedwig suggests only that the Cold War makes it impossible
to leave East Germany. In fact, US immigration law makes it impossible to enter the US.
As Lisa Lowe (1996), Eithne Luibhéid (2002), Siliva Pedraza (1991), Erica Rand (2005)
and others have argued, immigration in the US has historically been shaped by prevailing
ideas about gender, race, sexuality and country of origin that produce and regulate
heteronormativity. By having Hedwig become racialized within the structures of
heterosexuality, Mitchell’s film follows this logic of immigration law.
The film’s animation sequences by Emily Hubley further emphasize the parallel
between the division of national territory and the violence enacted upon Hedwig’s body.
In the origin myth that motors the film’s narrative, drawn from Plato’s Symposium on love,
the only reason there are two sexes is because vengeful gods split the polymorphously-
sexed children of the sun ‘right down the middle’. The thrust of the plot is that Hedwig
needs to find his other self and become whole, and the film connects the violent formation
of sexed bodies to the violent formation of nation-states. The Berlin Wall itself reinforces
this, with commentators and historians often describing it as a ‘jagged scar’ or ‘wound’
running through the city (Loshitzky 1997, 285). When Hansel sunbathes on a Palestinian
kuffiyeh in a bomb crater in East Berlin, he draws parallels between East Germany and
Palestine. But Hedwig also participates in moments of national violence herself,
destroying Yitzhak’s passport and threatening to turn in the rest of the band to
immigration.
By participating in the regulation of US immigration and security, Hedwig reveals the
power she holds over her band-mates and exemplifies how all citizens become complicit in
what Michel Foucault (2000 [1978]) calls ‘governmentality’. For Foucault, the shift from
sovereignty to governmentality becomes realized as individuals take up the operations of
the state through daily practices of regulation. Hedwig’s actions signal the ways that
governmentality links the geopolitics of the nation with the biopolitics of the individual
body. Hedwig’s participation in this governmentality is not only in regulating the behavior
of others, but also herself. Hedwig’s ‘scar running down [her] body like a sideways
 Gender, Place and Culture 239

grimace on an eyeless face’ is there only because she crossed a national border, echoing
Gloria Anzaldúa’s (1987) discussion of the production of the US – Mexico border as an
‘open wound’. Emphasizing the violence of national borders, Anzaldúa (1987, 3) writes,
Borders are set up to define the places that are safe and unsafe, to distinguish us from them . . .
The prohibited and forbidden are its inhabitants, the queer, the troublesome, the mongrel, the
mulatto, the half-breed, the half dead; in short, those who cross over, pass over or go through
the confines of the ‘normal’. (emphasis original)
For Anzaldúa, borders are simultaneously spaces of violence that reinforce hierarchies and
binaries, and spaces of possibility for those whose bodies, practices and identifications
challenge such binaries. Hedwig reveals both the wounds and desires produced through the
regulation of US citizenship.

‘The American Idiom’

Hedwig reveals how ‘the American Idiom’ is always produced in a transnational context.
One aspect of this dynamic is that Americans abroad often feel or are made to feel
‘at home’ in ‘foreign’ countries, which in turn transforms these ‘foreign’ locations.
As Avtar Brah (1996, 193) asks, ‘What is the difference between “feeling at home” and
staking claim to a place as one’s own?’ The US cultural presence that accompanies the US
military presence can lead to a desire for American culture and citizenship. In this way
the ideology of ‘America’ travels and transforms beyond its territorial boundaries
(Grewal 2005). As US culture travels, however, it is not simply passively absorbed around
the world. Globalization is not simply Americanization but rather a much more dialogical
and heterogeneous process. Cultural practices may travel from the US (or other places),
but the ways they are taken up and made meaningful in local contexts dramatically shapes
their import. The transnational production of the ‘American Idiom’ also means that
‘foreign’ influences in turn transform the meaning and contents of ‘America’. What passes
for ‘American culture’ is always already a blend of appropriated foreign and indigenous
domestic sources and what gets named as ‘American’ or ‘foreign’ is an expression of
national power. Similarly, immigrants are not simply passively absorbed into the US but
are actively transforming themselves and their new nation. They do not just become
American; they transform, if unevenly, what it means to be American. As Ella Shohat
(1998, 44) argues, ‘The continually changing makeup of the U.S. forces “us” always to
rethink the “we” . . . New immigrants stretch with their bodies the boundaries and
definitions of Americanness.’ Hedwig transforms not only her body but also the body
politic of ‘America’. Through this double transformation Hedwig emphasizes that cultural
conversion reshapes the larger society. Hedwig stretches the boundaries and definitions of
Americanness.
The pleasures of transnational identifications become evident in the exuberant and
dynamic form within which Hedwig’s story unfolds. The musical is a genre famous for
incorporating new musical styles, from vaudeville to hip-hop, and assimilating them into
its generic structure. For this reason, it has sometimes been considered a quintessentially
‘American’ or ‘Hollywood’ genre (Altman 1996, 294; Hayward 1996, 234). This
‘Americanness’ of the musical as genre, however, has frequently appropriated different
forms of cultural, music and dance expression without acknowledging these debts or
including the originators as performers (Shohat and Stam 1994, 158– 60; Smith 2005,
5– 53). As Ella Shohat and Robert Stam (1994, 223) argue, ‘the “imagined community”
of the classical musical is usually limited to the dominant White group . . . the musical
orchestrates a monolithically White communal harmony that represses awareness
240 J. Sandell

of America’s multicultural formation’. It is fitting that Hedwig should be a musical since it

exemplifies the ways that ‘American’ popular culture incorporates and absorbs elements to
recreate itself. Though Tommy Gnosis does not acknowledge that Hedwig co-authored the
songs he now sings as his own, John Cameron Mitchell and Stephen Trask wear their
musical debts on their sleeves. No secret appropriation here, but instead delirious
appreciation. As is typical for the genre, the songs carry much of the narrative burden, but
as with many musicals they also capture what Richard Dyer (2002, 20) has famously
called the signature of the musical: ‘what utopia would feel like rather than how it would
be organized’. As Stephanie Zacharek (2001, n.p.) argues in her review of the film,
‘There’s something blessedly inconsequential about a 3- or 4-minute rock song, and it’s
that very quality of fleetingness that allows one song to contain a whole world of feeling.’
The songs in Hedwig, which range from punk, to rock, to country, to power-ballad, are
not just moments of cinematic pleasure but also narrative development and queer
identification. As Judith Peraino (2006, 247) argues, ‘Glam rockers . . . light the way
for Hedwig’s only hope for self-invention outside the laws of marriage and citizenship.’
The film’s ‘infectious pop force’ emphasizes the pleasures and desires of cultural
production and reception (Meyer 2001, 3).
The circuits of cultural production and reception include a long tradition of artists
taking classically American texts and ideas and reshaping them to transform their
meanings. When Langston Hughes wrote, ‘I Too Sing America’, he showed that the idea
of America could include the descendants of former slaves; when Tato Laviera wrote,
‘AmeRı́can, defining myself my own way any way many ways Am e Rican, with the big R,
and accent on the ı́!’ she addressed the fact that ‘America’ includes more than just the US
but also North, South and Central America. Musicians have also transformed what counts
as ‘America’. When Jimi Hendrix played ‘The Star Spangled Banner’ at Woodstock in
1969, he made it his own and showed that ‘the land of the free and the home of the brave’
could include 1960s counter-culture. A decade later in 1978, Penelope Houston, of the
San Francisco punk band the Avengers, screamed that it was ‘The American in Me’ that
challenges the US to live up to its ideals of democracy. In 2003 the Council for Arab
American Relations launched a campaign featuring Americans saying, ‘I am an American
Muslim’. In this tradition, the opening musical number of Hedwig, a guitar solo of
‘America the Beautiful’, embraces and transforms the idea of what it means to be
American. The rock aesthetic of the Avengers and Jimi Hendrix finds expression in this
performance and Hedwig’s broader punk sensibility, what Dick Hebdige (1979, 17) calls
‘resistance through style’. Hedwig’s performance of ‘America the Beautiful’ is part of a
genealogy of artists reshaping the idea of America through cultural practices.

Conclusion
The ‘universal’ appeal of Hedwig’s story, which appears in many reviews and
commentaries, relies on a common trope when discussing queer subjectivity within a
multicultural and transnational framework. Calling upon liberal universal ideals can be a
powerful way to extend rights to formerly marginalized subjects, but it also erases the
specificity of their prior exclusion. Discussions of the universality of Hedwig’s story rarely
reference another kind of shared experience: uneven cultural or social citizenship. While
the film’s depiction of transsexuality is widely apprehended by critics and audiences, its
invocation of transnationality – how sexuality is regulated in relation to the nation – is
not. The film closes with Hedwig shedding her drag, her wigs and her band: she walks out
into the night naked, through an alley, being reborn. Implied by this ending is that Hedwig
 Gender, Place and Culture 241

has finally come to terms with her body: indeed it is unclear if Hedwig/Hansel at the end is
male or female, undercutting again any desire for sexual or gender narrative closure. But
the shift from an overtly political storyline to an individual one shifts the tenor of the film.
The legal, social and political issues that shape Hedwig’s personal life fade into the
background and the film becomes a narrative of self-awareness and liberation, using
tropes of self-improvement and individuality and focusing on finding the ‘real person’
underneath Hedwig’s drag and wigs. While the film critiques the costs the American
Dream can exact, it ends up tentatively celebrating its redemptive possibilities.
Hedwig’s transformation reveals the production of white heteronormative national
belonging, staging it for the audience rather than attempting to represent it. In this way,
Hedwig performatively produces her identity within the structures of what Muñoz (1999)
calls disidentification: interrupting the production of the heteronormative national
imaginary to foreground how cultural reception and circulation are as important as cultural
production. That Hedwig’s reception repeatedly renationalizes its narrative – even when
the film itself does otherwise – reminds us that we have to learn to see the transnational.
What would it mean to see Hedwig as not only or even about the universality of lost love
but also or instead about the everyday limits of national belonging? It is no accident that
Hedwig lives in Kansas, a state that from its inception into the union has had a contested
history. Entering the union in 1861 as a free state before the start of the Civil War, Kansas
has often been considered classically ‘middle America’. Kansas is geographically
central and also, according to Thomas Frank (2005, 31), considered what marketers call ‘an
early adopter’, a state that embraces new ideas quickly and enthusiastically. In the cultural
mythology of the US, Kansas is America. Hedwig’s story reveals the promise of the US and
the pleasures of identifications that cross national borders more easily than do people.

Acknowledgements
I previously presented a portion of this essay at the Popular Culture Association, San Francisco 2008.
I am grateful for comments and questions I received from the audience and other panelists.
Additionally, I would like to thank Douglas Blanc, Deborah Cohler, Julietta Hua, Kasturi Ray and
anonymous reviewers at Gender, Place and Culture for very helpful feedback on earlier versions of
this essay.

Notes
1. My argument about visibility and seeability is indebted to Karl Marx’s discussion of the
commodity form and subsequent readings of Marx by Rosemary Hennessy (2000) and Gayatri
Charavorty Spivak (1988). Marx (1976 [1867], 163– 165) argues that while we can ‘see’ a
relationship between raw materials and commodities (for example, between a tree, lumber and a
wooden table), and that we can ‘see’ its use value (the table is useful) and exchange value (it has
what he calls ‘mystical’ value as a commodity), we cannot ‘see’ the labor that transformed the
raw materials into a commodity. In fact, for Marx the hypervisibility of the commodity is in
inverse proportion to the invisibility of the labor that produced it. What is ‘visible’ is thus not
absolute but negotiable. We see the effects of labor but not the labor itself. In this way, Marx
distinguishes between the ‘visible’ (an historically and geographically located moment of visual
apprehension) and the ‘seeable’ (a physiological and empirical response to stimulus that is
experienced as seeing). Similarly, while the effects of globalization are frequently visible, the
processes that make possible those effects are not.
2. For useful and important discussions about the distinctions among the terms ‘queer’, ‘gay’,
‘transgender’, and ‘transsexual’, see Halberstam (2005); Hale (2006); Stryker (1998), and
Stryker and Whittle (2006).
3. Only Cynthia Fuchs (2001b) and Judith Peraino (2003, 2006) link Hedwig’s sexuality to her
nationality. Jordy Jones (2006) links Hedwig’s sexuality to her race and ethnicity and also
242 J. Sandell

persuasively argues that the film’s protagonist should not be understood as transsexual but rather
as a gay man who involuntarily undergoes gender reassignment surgery.
4. Yitzhak’s identity is not made explicit in the film but can be pieced together from Hedwig’s
paratexts: in deleted scenes from the film that appear on the DVD, it is revealed that Hedwig
first meets Yitzhak in Croatia, where they are both performing; in a scene that echoes the
circumstances of Luther’s and Hedwig’s marriage, Yitzhak greets Hedwig after a performance
saying, ‘I’m your biggest fan . . . will you marry me . . . take me away from this living hell’; in
the stage production, clips of which appear in the documentary, Whether You Like It Or Not,
Hedwig refers to Yitzhak as ‘the last Jewess in the Balkans’ who ‘lipsynched something from
Yentl as Krystal Nacht’; and on the DVD commentary, Mitchell notes that Yitzhak’s ‘true
essence’ is a drag queen.
5. When I discuss events that happen to Hansel I will refer to the character as ‘he’; when I refer to
events that happen to Hedwig, I will use ‘she’; and when I discuss the character generally,
without specific reference to youth or adulthood, I will use ‘she’.
6. For a discussion of queer sexual cultures and identities in East Germany during the Cold
War, see Giersdorf (2006, especially 172– 176). For a discussion of Eastern European
‘second world’ queer and feminist films in which gender and sexuality identity is
performatively produced in relation to Eastern European nationalisms, see Imre (2008) and
Marciniak (2005).
7. For debates about the centrality of music and song to gender, racial, regional and national
identities see, among others, Américo Paredes’ (1958) landmark study of the corrido; Tricia
Rose’s (1994) history of hip-hop in the US; Josh Kun’s (2005) analysis of race and music in the
US; George Carney’s (1998) special issue on geography and music in Journal of Cultural
Geography; and Janell Hobson and Diane Bartlow’s (2008) special issue on music in Meridians:
feminism, race, transnationalism.
8. According to a 2007 Department of Defense Base Structure Report, the US currently has 5300
sites around the world, both domestically and in 39 foreign locations, with the foreign majority
being in Germany (287 sites), Japan (130 sites) and South Korea (106 sites).
9. The name for ‘Armed Forces Radio’ has changed over the years. The following explanation
about the name comes from Steve Craig (1986, 44):
Originally established during World War II as the Armed Forces Radio Service
(AFRS), the advent of television changed the name to the Armed Forces Radio and
Television Service. Vietnam era antimilitarism brought about an early 1970s change to
the American Forces Radio and Television Service. In 1982, the Pentagon decided to
revert to the name Armed Forces Radio and Television Service. AFN, however, has
always gone by the name ‘American Forces Network’.
The AFRTS website at http://www.afrts.osd.mil uses ‘American Forces Network’ and
‘Armed Forces Network’ interchangeably, and a Google search under either name links to the
same site.
10. In the DVD commentary of Hedwig and in Whether You Like It or Not, John Cameron Mitchell
discusses how, as a teenager stationed with his family in Berlin from 1984 to 1988, he listened to
Armed Forces Radio, as Hansel does in the film. As an American with credentials, Mitchell
could, unlike Germans, easily pass through the checkpoint to visit queer punk bars in East
Germany. Mitchell’s ability to move freely between East and West Berlin means that, unlike
Hansel, his own body is as mobile as his identifications. Giersdorf (2006, 182) also notes that
listening to West Germany radio and television while living in East Germany is a site of queer
identification.
11. Without wanting to stretch the point too much, many of the rock-musicals that Hedwig
references – Cabaret, Tommy, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Without You I’m Nothing and
Velvet Goldmine – also connect sexual ambiguity and desire with questions about nationalism.
For example, Cabaret depicts decadent Weimar culture from the perspective of Euro-Americans
in Berlin; Tommy connects the familial drama of lost and new fathers with the national drama
of World War II; the ‘transvestites’ in The Rocky Horror Picture Show are from the planet
‘Transsexual’; in Without You I’m Nothing Sandra Bernhard comments on the appropriation of
repressed racialized and sexualized others in the production of American culture; and in
Velvet Goldmine the repressed past and ‘fictions of empires’ return to haunt the present in the
 Gender, Place and Culture 243

form of Oscar Wilde, who, left on the doorstep at the start of the film, is not from another country
but rather from outer space.
12. In Whether You Like It Or Not, Mitchell’s hairdresser for the show makes an off-hand
comment about the dozens of wigs made for Hedwig ‘by some poor Korean woman’,
revealing another way in which Hedwig’s formation as a queer national subject of the US is
indebted to the international division of labor that undergirds the transnational gendered
politics of beauty.
13. Prior to President Clinton signing ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, Don’t Pursue, Don’t Harass’ in 1993,
the official position of the military was to consider homosexuality ‘incompatible’ with military
service.
14. Drawing on earlier formulations of social contract theory by Thomas Hobbes (1985[1651]) and
John Locke (1988[1698]), Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1968[1762], 60) argued that by entering the
social contract and becoming part of a social community, humans forgo some of their ‘natural
freedom’ in order to gain ‘civil freedom’. Within liberal democracy, individuals give up
some personal rights in order to create a social contract with a government that will protect
those rights and the rights of the community. Where social contact theory names the existential
loss, Hedwig’s mother’s comment that ‘to be free you must give a little part of yourself’
emphasizes that for Hedwig it will also be a physical loss. See Hobbes, especially Part One
Chapter 14; Locke, especially Second Treatise Chapter 8; and Rousseau, especially Book One
Chapter 6.
15. Theorists such as Carole Pateman (1998), Charles Mills (1997) and Monique Wittig (1992)
have, respectively, argued that a ‘sexual contract’, ‘racial contract’, and ‘heterosexual
contract’ precedes the ‘social contract’. Judith Butler (1989) has argued that such contracts
do not so much ‘precede’ the social contract; rather, they are constituted through it and
each other.

Notes on contributor
Jillian Sandell is Associate Professor in the Department of Women and Gender Studies at
San Francisco State University. Her current project, Transnational Ways of Seeing, analyzes the
transnational production, circulation and reception of US popular culture.

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ABSTRACT TRANSLATION
Formas transnacionales de ver: pertenencia sexual y nacional en Hedwig and the
Angry Inch

Sostengo que las formas transnacionales de ver nos ayudan a aprehender las historias
de globalización, inmigración e imperialismo que enmarcan y hacen legibles las
producciones culturales. Centrándose en la pelı́cula de John Cameron Mitchell Hedwig
and the Angry Inch (2001), que ha sido casi universalmente recibida como sobre la
transexualidad, este ensayo argumenta que el film es igualmente sobre la
transnacionalidad y especı́ficamente sobre cómo las identificaciones e identidades queer
son producidas en relación con el Estado-nación. Hedwig explora los lı́mites de la
pertenencia nacional y los placeres de la cultura popular de EE.UU. a través de una óptica
de identidad sexual y de género, con la ambigüedad del cuerpo de Hedwig, que encarna la
confusión sobre la ciudadanı́a legal, polı́tica y cultural. El film identifica y critica las
violencias de la pertenencia nacional heteronormativa, pero leyendo Hedwig junto con
historias polı́ticas y legales que hacen legible su narrativa, se torna evidente que la
recepción popular de la pelı́cula frecuentemente borra las historias transnacionales
e imperiales que sostienen y producen las identidades e identificaciones sexuales.
Argumento que las prácticas culturales no reflejan simplemente las identificaciones
nacionales o queer sino también las producen. Las fisuras entre el trabajo cultural de la
pelı́cula en sı́ misma y de su circulación ilustra cómo, a pesar de la imbricación mutua de la
sexualidad y la nacionalidad, la transexualidad es a veces más fácilmente aprehensible que
lo que es la transnacionalidad.
Palabras clave: estudios culturales feministas transnacionales; Hedwig and the Angry
Inch; ciudadanı́a cultural
Gender, Place and Culture 247