“Beautiful and New”: The Logic of Complementarity in Hedwig and the Angry Inch

Adam Beyt

doi:10.3390/rel10110620

Abstract

This article suggests that reading John Cameron Mitchell’s musical Hedwig and the Angry Inch as a religious classic undermines the logic of complementarity within Catholic theological anthropology, particularly the Theology of the Body of John Paul II. A religious classic, a term coined by theologian David Tracy, describes a work with an “excess of meaning” that offers hope and resistance against a normative social structure. Hedwig resists the hegemonic structure of sexual dimorphism, as represented by the logic of complementarity operative within the Theology of the Body. This theological anthropology proposes a normative framework for human beings as gendered and sexual agents who “complete” each other through heterosexual and monogamous marital acts, reinforcing heterosexist and transphobic bodily norms. The work of Judith Butler helps illuminate the embodied performance of gender that the musical so brilliantly subverts. Hedwig, while toying with gender norms, also undermines the idea of the logic of complementarity—namely, that each person has another “half” that will cause completion, bringing human flourishing. In the title character not finding a version of “completeness” by the end of the show, the musical, thus, offers hope for those who cannot fit into gendered bodily norms.

Highlights

With musical hits like The Color Purple, Fun Home, Head Over Heels, Pricilla, Queen of the Desert, Rocky Horror Show, Kinky Boots, Falsettos, and La Cage aux Folles, Broadway musical theater as a genre of artistic expression never feared contending with the complexities of LGBTQ+ issues
As a contemporary theologian deeply engaged with philosophical hermeneutics, David Tracy is famous for his theories of religious interpretation, especially with his term, “religious classic.”
If Hedwig is to be read as a religious classical, i.e., an interpreted work of art that acts as a tool of resistance, what exactly is the musical resisting? To bring the musical into the realm of the theology, one first needs to be familiar with theological anthropology and how it relates to the logic of complementarity as exemplified in the Theology of the Body of Pope John Paul II

Summary

Introduction

With musical hits like The Color Purple, Fun Home, Head Over Heels, Pricilla, Queen of the Desert, Rocky Horror Show, Kinky Boots, Falsettos, and La Cage aux Folles, Broadway musical theater as a genre of artistic expression never feared contending with the complexities of LGBTQ+ issues. As described by Jack Halberstam, the marker points to “a politics based on a general instability of identity and oriented toward social transformation, not political accommodation.” He continues, “the category takes the prefix for transitivity and couples it with the asterisk that indicates a wildcard in internet searches; it is a diacritical mark that poses a question to its prefix and stands in for what exceeds the politics of naming and recognition.”. As this reading later shows, both the character and the author reject normative understandings of the human person based on the logic of complementarity and offer a radically new anthropology. This article explains what is meant by a religious classic, here referring to a text, event, person, or work of art that gives excess to meaning as an act of resistance against normative structures In this case, the normative structure refers to the “logic of complementarity,” as exemplified by the Theology of John Paul II. The text of the show is analyzed at length in order to propose an alternative theological anthropology to the logic of complementarity

Hedwig and the Angry Inch—A Religious Classic?

Theology of the Body and the Logic of Complementarity

Hedwig and Gender

Conclusions