Sublime Gender Transposition: The Reformed Platonism of Jacques Rancière’s Aesthetics as Queer Performance

Abstract

This article considers the political and aesthetic impact of Jacques Rancière’s reformulation of Platonic dialogics and reinvention of an emancipatory aesthetic sublime in relation to John Cameron Mitchell and Stephen Trask’s punk rock musical Hedwig and the Angry Inch and Leo Bersani and Adam Phillips’ Intimacies. It draws primarily on Rancière’s The Politics of Aesthetics, Aesthetics and Its Discontents and The Emancipated Spectator to argue that the cathartic moment of gender transposition or connection that Bersani and Phillips describe and Hedwig and the Angry Inch enacts represents a redistribution of the gendered sensible not merely on the (virtual or staged) body of the artist, but in the organisation of their aesthetic forums and ultimately society itself.