Becoming the Wig: Mis/Identifications and Citationality in Queer Rock Musicals

Performative citationality operates as a fetish in the queer musicals of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Hedwig and the Angry Inch, and Stadt der verlorenen Seelen. One watches queer musicals, as well as performs alongside queer characters through audience participation, to satisfy a desire to overstep limits of the performance of gender and sexuality, and essentially, our identity, in a sublime way. This desire must be blocked or disavowed, however, in order for one to return to heteronormality, which is done here through the mechanism of citationality. Viewers latch onto citations to disavow the queering that is taking place. This queering is manifested out of the excess that is exhumed from the sublime encounter with the queer performance of the film through aid of the queered citations. At the same time the film queers those viewers watching it, if only momentarily. Still, viewers maintain that they love the musical just for the music