Hamilton’s Gendered Entanglements

This chapter explores the contradictory, liminal representations of gender and sexuality in the musical Hamilton. The musical is primarily concerned with men and politics, but it also stars three charismatic women who sing some of the show’s most memorable numbers. Moreover, because Eliza Hamilton ends the musical, the audience is left feeling that her character matters, both as Hamilton’s wife and as author of the narrative just presented. In terms of sexuality, the musical presents Hamilton as a heterosexual charmer, but though Alexander is straight, his most intense relationship is with Aaron Burr, his eventual killer. Hamilton’s architecture intertwines an aesthetically revolutionary, ensemble-based political story with a conventional musical theater romance between two men. In the end, the portrayal of Hamilton’s women in reductive and conventional ways leaves space for the men’s relationships, particularly the one between Hamilton and Burr, to be the most complex in the show.

“First Love”

Eudora Welty’s strange and beautiful story “First Love” pairs two stories of love’s emergence from loss: the main character’s dawning love for Aaron Burr, who must leave him behind, and his love for his parents, from whom he has been separated in a raid. Joel, described as deaf and mute, falls in love with a great orator—for, the story tells us, one of his gestures. Turning to theories of gesture in Giorgio Agamben, Werner Hamacher, and others, the chapter links the emergence of desire to what these accounts suggest is the potentiality inherent in gesture: language, or proto-language, that expresses nothing other than itself, than its own happening. Welty’s own enigmatic language, where one is perhaps never sure whether any given statement is literal or figurative, embodies this language-turned-to-gesture and makes the events of the story difficult to distinguish from the taking place of its language—a recursive structure that the chapter suggests is the story’s rendering of the fathomless initiations, the abyssal temporalities, of the interval of queer becoming and inception. For the story never tells us what Joel becomes; it leaves Joel (and us) in what Kathryn Bond Stockton calls the “interval” of the queer child.