The cruel Berlin Wall has fallen down and Hensel turned into Hedwig. The latter is an ambitious transvestite who is in an attempt to gain both fame and harmony with oneself and wants to conquer America with bizarre concerts, love and sad songs. In this movie one can notice a lot of connected memories: his mother's letting his son and husband go; here's a funny boy, jumping on the bed with the jazz music; here's a guy with religious issues; and here is a grown up transgender individual with his radiant uniqueness.
A really strange world is represented to the viewer. The Hedwig’s searches are primarily associated with the seeking himself as an individuality and acceptance of himself as a whole person, as a non-divisibility into male and female. Hedwig is simultaneously he and she, the creator and sacrifice, love and hate, the yin and yang, good and evil, the unity and struggle of opposites. The entire movie is overwhelmed with different symbols. Not without purpose at the end of the narrative, the Hedwig’s tattoo becomes a circle, which is a symbol of wholeness and harmony.
Talking about transgender, it must be said that most people set their female or male at the age of one to one and a half years. However, the psychologically gender identity of some individuals is opposed to biological one, hence to chromosome (biological) set. These transsexuals feel themselves as in alienated body, and therefore they start to wear clothes and the image of the opposite sex. Hedwig is the perfect example of transgender, where he feels much better in the female body. According to some scholars, “Early research on transsexuality among ordinary people was undertaken in tandem with a scientific examination of homosexuality” (Califia, 1997). However, this is wrong presumption. The manifestations of transsexualism cannot be equated with homosexuality and transvestism. Transsexuals who suffer from discrepancy of their own sexual identity and biological gender, tend to change their appearance, wearing clothes appropriate to their sense. In contrast, passive or active homosexual clothes of the opposite sex are used to declare the nature of their sexuality, to attract potential partners. In addition, most transvestites are heterosexual. Hence, the formation of libido of transgender individual in most cases is equal to sexual identity. Even though the sexual desire reminds a homosexual one, their libido is directed to the opposite sex. For example, a transsexual male chooses heterosexual man as a partner, because he sees himself as a woman and a relationship with another woman is considered to be homosexual. That is what happened in the Hedwig and the Angry Inch. The back vocalist (who was a male) turned to be a lover of Hedwig, and this proves the transgender portrait, described above. Some scholars associate the transgender as a third wave of feminism. For instance, “By eschewing feminism or any other political implications of transgenderism, Jorgensen once again attempts to normalize the transsexual” (Califia, 1997). One should agree that the normalizing of any theory requires lots of efforts, since comparing transgender to heterosexual is not appropriate. Nowadays, everything starts to get correlated and exposed to everything else. Firstly, the body was a metaphor of the soul, like it was in medieval classic modern. Then, within the post-classical Freudian discourse, the gender was a metaphor for sex. Finally, today this metaphor gained its own unique power. The scholars started to split the concept of sex (biological construct) and gender (sociological construct) and the movie Hedwig and the Angry Inch showed perfectly the conflict between those two constructs.
Reference
Califia, P. (1997). Sex changes. San Francisco, Calif.: Cleis Press.
