**1. 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. While several gay and lesbian characters are proudly represented, there are very few lead roles that tell the life and times of trans\* individuals.<sup>1</sup> One notable exception is the 1998 Off-Broadway musical, *Hedwig and the Angry Inch.* Written and originally performed by John Cameron Mitchell, the show tells the story of Hedwig, a German-born rock singer who strives to find love and acceptance both as an artist and singer. The "Angry Inch" part of the title comes from Hedwig's botched sex change surgery that results in her body as being sexed as neither male nor female but caught in a liminal space.<sup>2</sup> With this graphic and

<sup>1</sup> The asterisk is added to trans in order to illustrate how the term can encapsulate the new ways of being in the world. 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." This gestures toward the failure of current and future classificatory systems that humans can come up. For him, the idea is "not to impose ever more precise calibrations of bodily identity but rather to think in new and different ways about what it means to claim a body." In other words, the purpose of the category of trans\*, in it being fragmented, segmented, and multiple, is to point to it being "a capacious and fluid category rather than a diagnosis" (Halberstam 2018, p. 88).

<sup>2</sup> While Hedwig's character may be described as intersex or gender queer, the character is generally referred to using feminine pronouns. Since the character does not describe herself as transgender and the show refers to the surgical procedure as a "sex change," I opt to describe the incident thusly rather than as a gender confirmation surgery.

unusual premise for a show, the character is rife for using the tropes of musical theater and glam-rock for meditating on non-normative experiences of gender and embodiment.

One of the main themes of the show concerns "the logic of complementarity." This logic describes how every person has a supposed "partner" that functions to "complete" that person. By this logic, a person remains incomplete and unfulfilled until finding one's "better half." In operating under this logic, finding a significant other is one of the most important goals for achieving happiness and flourishing. While the logic of complementarity disseminated into popular culture—think of the ubiquity of the term "soul mate"—such logic is also present within religion as well. As represented by the interpretation of Genesis of Pope John Paul II in the collection of texts called "Theology of the Body," the logic of complementarity is crucial for setting the grounds for a normative anthropology, here referring to an understanding of what it means to be human in relation to God.

The musical *Hedwig and the Angry Inch*, while not explicitly grappling with Theology of the Body, contends explicitly with the logic of complementarity. As articulated by the myth of Aristophanes from Plato's Symposium, Hedwig aspires to find her "other half" in a world that perpetual rejects her as a legitimate artist and viable romantic partner. The show engages specifically with the logic of complementarity within Christianity through the character Tommy Gnosis through a lens not unlike the interpretation of Genesis proposed by John Paul II. Indeed, the show might be read as a "religious classic," one that offers hope and resistance over against pervading gender norms. I argue for an interpretation of the show as its own theological anthropology that posits hope for those who do not or cannot long for a significant other that "completes" them in these mythologized accounts of being human.

While Mitchell makes no direct reference to Roman Catholic Theology of the Body in the text of the musical itself, he was, however, raised as a Roman Catholic during the pontificate of John Paul II. He eventually came to reject his Catholicism by becoming both a Radical Faerie and a Universal Life Minister (Universal Life Church 2019). 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.

Firstly, 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. Then, the work of Judith Butler is marshaled to help illuminate the complex dynamics of gender and embodiment operative within the show. Finally, the text of the show is analyzed at length in order to propose an alternative theological anthropology to the logic of complementarity.

## **2. Hedwig and the Angry Inch—A Religious Classic?**

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." A classic has "an excess of meaning" that "demands constant interpretation and bears a certain kind of timelessness" (Tracy 1981, p. 102). This is an instance whereby the interpreter is called to be "vexed, provoked, challenged by the claim to attention of the text itself" (Tracy 1981, p. 105). A classic transforms "if only for a moment, ourselves: our lives, our sense for possibilities and actuality, our destiny" (Tracy 1981, p. 110). The classic is created when an artist dives into reality to tell us something new and true about existence. The artist or author enters a moment of intensification that takes one into new territories. This diving into new existence allows us as interpreters of it to see something new, "its fatedness, its challenge, its finitude, its horrors, its possibility, its joy." Through this process, people who encounter the work are led to believe that such intensification is worth its risk. It allows those who encounter the work to realize that we now grasp essential truths that were not realized outside of this diving into reality (Tracy 1981, p. 126).

The religious classic is characterized by this "diving into reality" in relation to human encounters with God. For Tracy asserts, the task of the theologian is to interpret encounters with God as religious classics as acts of hope and resistance. In interpreting religious classics, we allow them "to challenge what we presently consider possible. To interpret them is also to allow ourselves to challenge them through every hermeneutic of critique, retrieval, and suspicion we possess." His work with a variety of thinkers led him to explore the possibility of interpreting God in fairly unconventional sites. Within the constellation of thinkers labeled as "post-modern" Tracy notes how "the language of love as in the love of the mystics, along with their use of erotic and sometimes violent, transgressive language" was used for constructive and political ends alike (Tracy 1994, pp. 314–15). Another aspect of this constellation of dispositions is a prophetic impulse seeking to overthrow the oppression and hegemony of modernity. For Tracy, an experience of God is manifested within the groups designated as "non-persons," folks thrust to the margins of society. The voice of God is mediated through "hysterics, fools, avant-garde artists, and dissenters of all kinds" (Tracy 1994, pp. 317–18). Discerning different ways of talking about God means interpreting new and unusual sources that have the potential to give way to an "excess of meaning." For Tracy, religious beliefs become acts of hope that are also "acts of resistance against the status quo" (Tracy 1987, pp. 84–85). They are an awareness of God as the Ultimate Reality and an innate concern for those often made the societal Other (Tracy 1987, p. 104). The person who interprets a religious classic will discern "the interruptive presence of Ultimate Reality empowering a way of life otherwise thought impossible" (Tracy 1987, p. 108). Tracy's notion of the religious classic emphasizes new ways of understanding God as concerned for marginalized communities, thus offering hope and resistance to help imagine new ways of being in the world.

One aspect of Tracy's articulation of the term "religious classic" is the ambiguity for its qualifications. As a Roman Catholic theologian, he posits the Christ event, the life and death of Jesus of Nazareth, as the "religious classic" par excellence. This leads him to claim that all theology is a "hermeneutical endeavor" since all Christian thought traces its origins to an interpretation of the Christ event (Tracy 1981, p. 64). His references to works of art that do contain an "excess of meaning" seem to be what one would expect for a gender-conforming, white priest who spent decades in academia: the Sistine Chapel, the music of Bach, and the poetry of T. S. Eliot.<sup>3</sup> The choice of these works into this "religious classic" canon suggests more about the tastes and background of Tracy than the works themselves. As with every consumer of art and media, his choice of works to examine is limited by his particular horizon of experience. This same limitation, of course, leaves space for other interpreters inhabiting alternative horizons to examine different texts in a similar manner.

*Hedwig and the Angry Inch* is a fairly recent addition to the American musical theater canon, making its Off-Broadway debut in 1998. Within that short timeframe, *Hedwig* became immensely popular within the past 20 years, with multiple productions throughout the world, a 2001 film with a cult following, national tours, and a hit Broadway revival in 2014.<sup>4</sup> For such a show to achieve rabid popularity, surely there must be some kind of "excess of meaning" to which people are extrapolating from the show? Furthermore, given the many philosophical and religious themes running throughout the text of the show, the show, if anything else, seems rife for theological engagement. *Hedwig* certainly qualifies as a religious classic insofar as it gives way to an excess of meaning, operates from a marginalized perspective, and tries to rail against a normative structure, in this case, sexual and gender dimorphism and the relational norms that help maintain its power.

<sup>3</sup> See his commentary on the recent "Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination" exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City for an example of his analysis of Roman Catholic art (Tracy 2018).

<sup>4</sup> Indeed, with the 2014 revival of *Hedwig and the Angry Inch*, the once subterranean and subversive show seems to have reached "mainstream" audiences. The show opened on 24 April 2014, with openly gay (and immensely popular) actor, Neil Patrick Harris, in the title role. The production ran for 507 regular performances, receiving multiple Tony wins in June of 2014, including best actor for Harris and best revival of a musical. The role of Hedwig was filled by many mainstream and celebrity actors, including Andrew Rannells, Michael C. Hall, John Cameron Mitchell, Darren Criss, and Taye Diggs. The Broadway revival ran for a total of 507 performances after 22 previews (Broadway.com 2015).
