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

Abstract

As a global phenomenon, Harry Potter has attracted most diverse audiences and provoked many contradictory responses and debates. While many critics have highlighted the enforcement of heteronormativity in the storyworld, fan responses – and especially slash fan fiction – provides us with an abundance of contradictory queer responses and non-heteronormative re-readings and rewritings of Harry Potter. By constantly confronting and intertwining the academic strategy of queer reading as introduced by Kosofsky Sedgwick with the responses of slash fans, I want to discuss the tensions between latent meanings and resistant readings that embrace the Harry Potter universe. In reference to Iser’s concept of the Leerstelle, the various omissions, indeterminacies, and contradictions in Harry Potter that provide a fertile ground for the interpretation of subtextual contents and for transgressive re-writings alike will be explored and discussed within the larger framework of film history and the fantasy genre.