(no subject)

[blahflowers]

Rowling's Heteronormative Law: In any discussion of Rowling's post novels outing of Albus Dumbledore the probability of someone trying to defend her position by asking how she would have done it in the novels, then using some ridiculous example (Dumbledore wearing leather chaps, being photographed at Duckie etc), approaches one.

OK, it needs a bit of work.

Comments

[djm4]

Is there any mileage in defending her position on the grounds that she's managed to have a key character in one of her books be gay without anyone much noticing? And that this may cause some people to challenge their assumptions about how easy it is to spot gay people?

Serious question. I was quite impressed with what she'd managed to do, but I know nothing about the theory behind this, and I'm interested to find out exactly how wrong I am (I'm clearly somewhat wrong, based on the reactions of pretty much everyone I respect who actually knows about this stuff).

[blahflowers.livejournal.com]

The problem is, how do you tell people that he's gay within the novel without, erm, revealing that he's gay? Sure, the newspapers picked up on this story once bloggers found the story, but I would expect a vox pop of kids who have taken the book out of our library, say, would reveal that the majority of them have not heard this.

The closet in fiction is possibly even worse than the closet in real-life, although at least in fiction there's a chance that you'll be transported to a magical world of dominatrixes and furries. ;)

[gane5h.livejournal.com]

She's managed to have a key character be utterly sexless, his homosexuality be hidden to the extent that not even he seems to notice he's gay. I think it'd have been more impressive (and more useful) to have a gay character with whom one might readily identify ie. not apparently nailed into the closet.