the reinvention of close reading: harry potter, gay subtext, and death of the author

[merelydovely]

Tumblr helpfully directed me toward this wonderful article in the Paris Review stuffed with a visceral nostalgia for the heady early days of Wolfstar, back when we still believed JK Rowling understood her own characters as well as her readers did.

The summer of 2003 was the summer of noticing. It was the summer I sat alone for hours in my mother’s parked car, blasting Queen’s “The Show Must Go On” (track 17 on my favorite CD) and luxuriating in body-racking sobs of grief for Sirius Black, sorrow for Remus Lupin, and ecstatic rapture that I’d noticed. We took to the internet, those of us who had noticed, and compared notes. Often these notes took the form of fan fiction, which I read ravenously, hungry not so much for erotica as for the full novelistic experience Rowling had invited us to imagine—a boarding-school romance turned wartime tragedy, Maurice meets Atonement by way of Animorphs.

I'm a few years younger than the article's author, so it took me a little bit longer to get on the "close read" bandwagon, but this article struck a chord with me all the same. It really did feel, for a while, like Sirius/Lupin was where things were heading, and like we were all geniuses for seeing the signs.



And it felt that way all too often, didn't it? A few short years later, I was up to my eyeballs in meta for House M.D., convinced with all the zeal of a convert that surely the show was setting us up for House and Wilson to be together. It just made sense.

And then another couple years down the road for me it was BBC Merlin with Merthur, and Teen Wolf with Sterek, and Sherlock with Johnlock, and I eventually stopped really believing there would ever be any follow-through, but I never stopped being mad that these shows were actively trying to get me to do the legwork to create queer romance where there was none.

I'm the kind of fan who likes to exhaustively ground their shipping in canon hints, but I feel like these days I no longer have sufficient emotional patience for doing proper close readings of modern shows. Like, I still appreciate them when I see them, but I'm overall significantly less effortful about unearthing queer subtext in places that by all right should have queer text. Now I'm more likely to just go with "I like them together so they're queer because I said so," instead of trying to justify my ship with well-cataloged canon proofs.

This might explain why I've found a fandom home in the Les Misérables fandom, which is still arguing about gay subtext in a book written in the 1860s. And we still give Victor Hugo grief for not making things explicitly gayer, since that kind of story wasn't unheard of even then.



What's your immediate reaction to the article? Do you have any memory of those pre-Potterdammerüng days? What do you feel is gained by doing close reads of media that are unlikely to bear fruit?

Comments

[merelydovely]

I was at a convention panel in May about queerbaiting and I asked "how do you tell the difference between slow-burn and queerbaiting?". The answer we agreed on? You don't.

Ain't that the truth. I think in order for genuine slow burn not to read as queerbaiting, you'd have to have had decades of normalization of queer relationships onscreen. The only reason I trust She-Ra and the Princesses of Power to not be queerbait is because I've read Noelle Stevenson's other work – specifically Nimona, where the supervillain and the golden hero are exes who get back together in the end of the comic. But it's a very shaky sort of trust, now that she's working with a big studio instead of on her own personal webcomic, no matter how queer-friendly the show seems otherwise!

[captainlordauditor]

On the other hand, there's a danger in going too far in that direction, too. I once had a high schooler tell me that if she's reading for fun she only reads LGBT fiction or books with explicitly gay characters. And while I can absolutely understand the place she was coming from, my first thought was to feel sorry for her because of books like Circle of Magic, which was a YA series originally published in the early 90s, and took about 10 books for the writer to convince the publisher to let her confirm two of the main characters as wlw, despite them raising children together.

Perhaps there's a difference between books, where the control is more centred around the author, and tv shows, where it's spread amongst everyone in the studio and the network execs?

[merelydovely]

Oh man. Lark and Rosethorn being confirmed as not only wlw, but also polyamorous wlw, on top of Daja being confirmed gay, really vindicated my deep and abiding love for that series.

The thing with Circle of Magic, I think, was that while Lark/Rosethorn being confirmed retroactively fit perfectly into the existing story, there wasn't really anything in the 8 books prior that read to me as "queerbaiting." Lark's love for Rosethorn was most obvious in Briar's Book during the Blue Pox epidemic, but even now I'm not sure I could read any of their behavior as notably romantic in nature. Maybe that was because I was like 13 or whatever when I read it the first time, but you know what I mean, right?

I think it's okay if kids want to just read stuff that's explicitly queer from start to finish. It's how I feel about not reading old dead white guy fiction or watching Louis C.K. standup. Yes, the stuff those people produced was high-quality and insightful and everything, but there's SO MUCH STUFF in the world. We don't have time to consume all of it. Maybe she just doesn't read Tammy's stuff until someone explicitly recommends it; much as I love the series, I think it's fine if she reads something else good in its place.

[captainlordauditor]

I think there's a particular danger with queer fiction because it's already so easy for us to forget our history, since we aren't raised by other queer people. Look at, for example, the lack of knowledge surrounding the AIDS crisis in the younger generations. So to me saying that older fiction isn't explicitly gay enough is saying that that history is unimportant or not worth acknowledging; but if we have a history we can't be discounted as a new trend. This is something I've struggled with a lot as someone who's trans.

It's certainly fine for any individual not to read any series for whatever reason, but I'm loathe to see it become a trend. In any case this was a startling moment for me because I suddenly felt very old.

Perhaps CoM wasn't the best example, but it was the one that came to mind because it fits so many of the things I hear people say they want from queer fiction. It's not About Being Gay, it's a genre series, etc.

[merelydovely]

I hear this sort of thing in the Les Mis fandom from people who are inordinately impressed that Victor Hugo compared a pair of characters to multiple historic gay-ish couples and used the word "loved" to describe how one male character felt about another, as if this was the peak of representation in 1865 and he couldn't possibly have done anything more. But then more historically-minded fans point out that actually, there were other examples of literature at the time that were explicitly queer, they're just not as widely known.

So I guess that while I do want the next generation of queer kids to know their history, I also don't want them to get the impression that there wasn't any explicitly queer stuff in history and all we have is subtext. There weren't very many queer YA books in the 90s, but they did exist!

I think you have a good point about CoM/TCO/TCR being What People Say They Want. Unfortunately, What People Say They Want and what they're actually willing to invest time and emotional energy in are often not the same...

[captainlordauditor]

Sometimes I forget that it's not common knowledge that 19th century men were much more open about platonic affection and wonder how the hell people are so stupid...

I think also my perspective is changed by being trans. For us, even today, it's either subtext, or About Being The Thing. Trying to find a good story about a trans man that's not centred on him being trans, much less genre fiction, is like trying to find a needle in a haystack.