response question

To gain the full ten points for this (and your other) discussion posts please:
1) Click on my initial question/post below to view this week’s discussion question.

2) Once you have your notes ready, respond to the prompt in two-to-three paragraphs using specific moments from the week’s readings. This response should include at least 3 cited quotations, it should make at least 1 reference to the week’s lecture, and it should demonstrate that you have completed all of the assigned reading, listening, and viewing activities. Quotations should be formatted to look like the following example, and they should be followed by analysis sentences that demonstrate how or why the quote is important. Failure to analyze your quotes will result in a loss of points.

Example: “I was especially struck by the ways that Hedwig and Tommy’s song, “Wicked Little Town” dramatized their shared feelings of alienation in Junction City, KS using reference to biblical mythology. After making reference to inhabitants who are “so twisted up, they’ll twist you up, I fear,” the speaker (Hedwig) cautions the listener (Tommy) against becoming “someone you are not” by asking him to remember “Mrs. Lot, and when she turned around ” (Wicked Little Town). Mrs. Lot is a reference to Lot’s wife in the bible, who turned back in pity as the angels destroyed the city of Sodom, and so was punished her for sympathy for Sodomites by being turned into a pillar of salt. By cautioning Tommy against turning into a Mrs. Lot, Hedwig is telling him that he may lose himself if he tries to make his way in the world by hiding his sexuality, and in fact this is what happens when Tommy rises to fame as a closeted performer later in the story.

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Part 1: How does Hedwig’s journey play with and poke fun at binary and/or normative notions of gender? How do we see others respond to Hedwig’s genderqueer identity? In what ways does Hedwig’s experience ask us to consider the place of hybrid forms of gender identity, expression, and experience that are unfixed, messy, or queer? Please cite specific examples from Hedwig’s dialogue and/or music and use analysis to explain how your examples answer this question.

Part 2: Hedwig’s journey makes reference to fairy tales, Greek mythology, popular culture, rock music, and the bible. How do you see this story using art and storytelling to articulate queer experiences of gender in a society based on binary notions of male and female? How does Hedwig flip the narrative of old stories or reimagine the content and purpose of music? What can this tell us about the relationships among art, identity, sexuality, and gender?

Part 3 (worth 2 point of extra credit): Please read and analyze “Aristophanes’ Speech on the Origin of Love,” then cite specific content from the reading and the song “Origin of Love” to explain how Hedwig draws on and revises this myth. Why do you think Stephen Trask and James Cameron Mitchell use this myth as the foundation of Hedwig’s journey (through his song, monologues, and tattoo)? In what ways does the film complicate the binary logics encoded in this myth–especially through the ending of the play?

https://www4.fmovies.se/film/hedwig-and-the-angry-inch.jv298/4w7qvj

^ link to the movie/play