Transnational ways of seeing: sexual and national belonging inHedwig and the Angry Inch

Abstract

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. IntroductionTransnational 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

Teaching feminism: Problems of critical claims and student certainty

“…For example, I wanted my students to read Jillian Sandell’s excellent analysis of the film, ‘Transnational Ways of Seeing: Sexual and National Belonging in Hedwig and the Angry Inch ’ (2010), alongside the film. Sandell argues that Hedwig’s fractured queerness is as much a function of transnational politics as transsexuality.…”

Gender and sexuality I

“…Misgav and Johnston (2014) pay attention to trans women's bodies, sweat and subjectivities in a Tel Aviv nightclub, and on another dance floor, in Detroit, 'ballroom culture' facilitates community queer spaces for black and Latina/o LGBTIQ people (Bailey, 2014). The politics of gender can also be seen in analyses of transgender performance in contemporary Chinese films (He, 2013) and films about transnationalism (Sandell, 2010). Significantly, the research conducted in these 'club', dance and performance spaces highlights the ways in which gender is felt, celebrated and marginalized for trans* people.…”

Language and social knowledge

“…I imagine this method I refer to as a sociology of translation to incorporate transnational ways of seeing into the interpretive epistemic mode Reed beautifully describes (Sandell, 2010). It can also provide guidance for one way in which we can do sociology in an increasingly transnational world.…”