The Pursuit of Eros in Plato’s Symposium and Hedwig and the Angry Inch

Abstract

Mitchell's film Hedwig and the Angry Inch (2001) traces the sexual and spiritual journey of a partially transgendered rock star searching for her "other half." Her pursuit of erotic completion is depicted explicitly in "The Origin of Love," a song based on a creation myth told only in Plato's Symposium. This article demonstrates that the film owes a greater ideological debt to the Platonic dialogue than has been recognized and investigates how the narrative of Hedwig's story visually dramatizes the Symposium's many forms of eros. Both works delineate a sphere of all-male sexuality to explore the origin and satisfaction of erotic longing while employing a female persona to show that the highest form of love transcends physicality to culminate in the pursuit of knowledge. While Mitchell transports the premise of the Symposium to the cutting edge of cinema and music, he expands its ideological range to interrogate the definition of love and its intersection with gender identity.

Poetics, Perversions, and Passing: Approaching the Transgender Narratives ofThesmophoriazousai

“…3 The 1. For Hedwig and Plato, see Sypniewski (2008). For the Symposium speech as a plausible extrapolation from Aristophanic comedy, see Ruffell (2011) 13-18. The Greek text of Aristophanes adopted here follows that of Henderson (1998Henderson ( -2000 with some modifications.…”

“Not the Lover’s Choice, but the Poet’s”: Classical Receptions in Portrait of a Lady on Fire

“…189c-193e), is the inspiration to another film centered on queer experience that also makes strategic use of music: Hedwig and the Angry Inch (dir. John Cameron Mitchell 2001), whose point of origin is the song called "The Origin of Love"; see Peraino (2005:246-252), Sypniewski 2009, Jenkins (2015). 9…”