What Does Harry Potter Mean Now? [85:12-90:14]

She just does it euphemistically. There are overt references to swearing, vulgarity, alcoholism, sex, at least second place, and even bestiality. But there are no similar indications of queerness, even with Dumbledore. The only literal acknowledgments of queerness are one, a homophobic insult. Who's sad, Drake? Your boyfriend? And two, a no-homo joke. Well, he's not my type, but he'll do. So from all of this, we might conclude that any queer interpretations readers make of Potter are pure projection and have nothing to do with the literal text. But we would be wrong. Potter has, or used to have, anyway, a strong queer following. Asia Romano wrote about how Potter was instrumental in realizing their gender queer identity. Eden Ariel Gordon wrote about how Potter was a comfort growing up bisexual in a place which felt hostile to her identity. Dana Alia Levinson and Jackson Bird each wrote about how Potter and the fandom helped them accept themselves as trans. I remember the pain I felt when reading the chapter about the mirror of Eris said, because I knew where it would show me if I were to look into it. Myself as a girl, looking back at me. While I was nervous about coming out to some relatives and acquaintances, I never doubted that the Harry Potter family community would accept me for who I was. Which is what makes Joanne's gender-critical activism such a slap in the face. It's not just that she's contradicting the book's apparent message. It's that, for a lot of queer fans, her books played a role in understanding or accepting their queer identities. Despite how conspicuously absent queerness is in the series, queer people have, not the less, found queer meanings that are very real to them. Like Bart says, a text is not made of a single voice. Even if an author doesn't intend a queer meaning, they may still unwittingly reflect or adapt queer meanings which already exist in our culture. Queer readings aren't alternative readings, wishful or willful misreadings, or reading too much into things' readings. They result from the recognition and articulation of the complex range of queerness that has been in popular culture texts and their audiences all along. And Potter is playing in a very queer sandbox. Queer culture has long been drawn towards fantasy and the supernatural, because queer people tend to identify with the other. Magic is transgressive and feared by society, often kept secret, whilst also being literally empowering, offering tantalising possibilities of escape, retribution and transformation. Likewise, queer people often sympathise with monsters, maybe because queerness itself has often been portrayed as monstrous, as a long history of queer-coded fantasy villains, or because monsters can serve as allegories for queer experiences, not just to represent being marginalised or demonised, but also to take joy in difference, in individual expression, in non-conformity. Fantasy is all about imagining ways our society and culture could be different. The intrinsic weirdness and weirdness that comes with being this kind of person can shift people's lives and perspectives towards alternative and transgressive ways of thinking, all of which is conducive to connecting with monstrous, strange and magical things. So the moment Joanne began writing about these subjects, whether she realised it or not, she was encoding queer meanings into her text. Needless to say, identity is a huge theme in Potter. The moment Joanne introduces other types of human into her narrative, not just wizards, but werewolves, ghosts, vampires, and a magey, half giants, half goblins, half villa, she can't help but raise questions of identity. And when she introduces prejudice against certain types, she also can't help dipping a toe into the queer lexicon. I am what I am, and I'm not ashamed. You can view the first book as essentially a coming-out story. I mean, Harry literally comes out of a closet. Upon reaching adolescence, Harry learns the truth of his own identity. His intrinsic unusualness which separates him from ordinary society. And he learns this otherness ties him to a community of kindred people, where he finds the acceptance and family he didn't get at home. However, his newfound community lives in secret in an underground world mapped onto the ordinary one and wizards use a coded language to find and communicate with each other. Which mirrors the way queer people build their communities right under the noses of straight society, especially in the days before gay liberation. And if we trust Dumbledore's notes in the tales of Beedle the Bard, wizards secrecy is partly due to fear of persecution from muggles. Certainly, the dursleys fear of magic is easily compared to homophobia. Once again, it uses the same lexicon.