Harry Potter que(e)r

Queering Harry, slashing Potter: Between latent meanings and resistant readings

“…On the other hand, although there are no explicitly or openly gay characters in the original text, some critics have praised Harry's process of becoming a wizard as a strong metaphor for the act of coming out (Bronski 2003) and pointed to the protagonist's non-hegemonic masculinity (Gallardo/Smith 2003;Wannamaker 2008). In addition, fan writers have published hundreds of thousands of stories online, so-called slash fan fiction (Jenkins 1992: 185-222), that are filled with queer utopias and homoerotic fantasies about Harry's world (Willis 2006;Tosenberger 2008a;Tosenberger 2008b;Cuntz-Leng 2015). Writing slash fan fiction and creating slash fan art is a fan-cultural practice that at least dates back to the 1960s, when the first homoerotic rewritings of the relationship between Spock and Kirk, fictional characters from the TV series Star Trek (Gene Roddenberry, 1966-1969, were written and shared through fanzines.…”

“…At the same time, classic Hollywood movies show a degree of queerability that appears to be quite similar to Harry Potter, the Harry Potter films in particular, and other contemporary fantasy blockbusters. One only has to think of extensively discussed movies of this era in terms of their queer subtexts like Ben Hur (William Wyler, 1959), Some Like It Hot (Billy Wilder, 1959), or Rebel Without a Cause (Nicholas Ray, 1955) (Cuntz-Leng 2015. Looking ahead, I want to propose the hypothesis that Hollywood today is reviving its golden years through fantasy storyworlds, and I will give some prospects regarding possible future developments.…”