Revelio - Revealing What is Hidden Between the Lines: A Queer Reading of the Harry Potter Novels

Abstract

Compared to many other countries, Norway is considered relatively safe and accepting. In spite of this, the attack on an Oslo gay bar as recently as 2022 showed that the queer community still has reasons to feel unsafe. The word “gay” (“homo”) is among the most used slur words in the Norwegian classrooms, and as teachers it is our responsibility to both educate and form future generations. The school should be a safe and including space for everyone, and the curriculum even emphasizes that it should be a place which promotes diversity, and fosters curiosity and knowledge about different sexual orientations. Building on a base of the metaphors of mirrors, windows, and sliding glass doors, this literary analysis will highlight a more untraditional angle on representation. Or to put it another way, this thesis has as purpose to show how representation can be done implicitly and through other markers than just through explicit identity markers. The literary analysis uses queer theory as its foundation and how it aims to read against the grain to uncover hidden queer meanings, it takes a closer look upon the representation of the concepts of heteronormativity, the closet and coming out, as well as queer fatalism. The chosen literature for this thesis is the Harry Potter series by J. K. Rowling. The thesis found many examples of heteronormativity and the juxtaposition of the queer, which illustrated that something is not dependent on explicit representation in order to be relatable to queer concepts and queer experiences. The closet turned out to be present at numerous occasions throughout the story, both literally where Harry starts his journey, and through more hidden and metaphorical actions of both Harry and other characters throughout the series. Lastly, the thesis found that Rowling positioned the Harry Potter series and the character Albus Dumbledore to a long list of unhealthy and potentially damaging portrayals of queer characters through queer fatalism, which contributes to the earlier findings that queer characters are the most useful when gone or dead. The findings in this thesis illustrates how one can use literature or similar media that, while not associated with queerness or queer characters to begin with, can still open up for and facilitate for queer representation.

Keywords: queer representation, coming out, the closet, heteronormativity, queer fatalism, Harry Potter, metaphorical representation.