WHO is the joy-sucking entity here?
Here is the Museum of Pop Culture blog post by Chris Moore explaining why the museum is displaying JKR’s work but not her name, aka stealing her intellectual property without acknowledgement. Apart from the sheer spiteful nastiness it seems to me to be remarkably childish and silly for a museum administrator, but maybe I’m wrong, maybe it’s just pop culturey.
Remember, this blog post is on the museum’s website, so it’s speaking for the museum, not just Chris Moore the (proudly gender-special) person.
Title: She-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named
Subhead: There’s a certain cold, heartless, joy-sucking entity in the world of Harry Potter and, this time, it is not actually a Dementor.
Body of text:
We would love to go with the internet’s theory that these books were actually written without an author, but this certain person is a bit too vocal with her super hateful and divisive views to be ignored. Yes, we’re talking about J.K. Rowling, and no, we don’t like that we’re giving her more publicity, so that’s the last you’ll see of her name in this post. We’ll just stick with You-Know-Who because they’re close enough in character.
Her transphobic viewpoints are front and center these days, but we can’t forget all the other ways that she’s problematic: the support of antisemitic creators, the racial stereotypes that she used while creating characters, the incredibly white wizarding world, the fat shaming, the lack of LGBTQIA+ representation, the super-chill outlook on the bigotry and othering of those that don’t fit into the standard wizarding world, and so much more. We’re going to be focusing on You-Know-Who’s transphobic views in this blog post because she’s really doubled down on them lately.
So, hi! An introduction is important for this post because, while I’m writing for MoPOP, I’m also an individual who has been affected by her viewpoints. My name is Chris Moore (he/they) and I am the Exhibitions Project Manager at MoPOP. I’m also a board member for the Seattle Trans and Nonbinary Choral Ensemble and a transgender Harry Potter ex-fanatic.
He/they used to love HP, from 1998 on.
A bit of history is important here, too. You-Know-Who started dancing around transphobic statements in 2018 and became more vocal in 2019 by supporting a person who was fired for being transphobic. In June of 2020, she fully committed to these viewpoints and went on long, hateful Twitter tirades (we recommend not reading them, but here’s Daniel Radcliffe being an awesome ally on Rolling Stone). This caused many cast members of Harry Potter to distance themselves from her… unfortunately, it also caused many cast members to support her and out themselves as being transphobic. In the same year, she released a new book under her pen name about a serial killer who dresses in women’s clothing to seduce his victims. It ends up being an entire novel of thinly veiled transphobic scare tactics.
I haven’t read it but I’ve gathered that that’s not true…unless of course “thinly veiled” means “barely at all.”
(I have to admit I’ve tried a couple of the Cormoran Strike novels and gave up both times. I have to admit I don’t like them and don’t think they’re very good. I admire JKR as an activist but not as a novelist.)
And what is MoPOP doing? If you’ve visited the museum recently, you will have seen artifacts from the Harry Potter films in Fantasy: Worlds of Myth and Magic gallery and her likeness in the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame. They’re there and trying to dance around it would make me look like a bigger hypocrite. But here’s the deal… it’s complicated. Long conversations are being had and a lot of considerations around what to do with problematic people and content because instances like this are going to keep happening. I’m privileged to get to work with our Curatorial team and see the decision-making processes there, so let me give you a little bit of insight into what these are like after someone outs themself as holding terrible ideologies.
Nah, I’ll stop there, thanks, and let Pecksniff do his thing by himself.
The place should rename itself the Museum of Popular Inquisition.
‘I admire JKR as an activist but not as a novelist.’ Same. I understand some stickering is planned in the vicinity; keep your eye out for it.
Ask Chris Moore to talk about Karen White, Jonathan Yaniv and Barbie Kardashian.
There are a couple of transgender characters in Cormoran Strike novels, possibly even in Troubled Blood, and they are treated very sympathetically. The serial killer in question dressed as a woman sometimes, as a disguise, not as a persona, and he never claimed to be female. This idea that the book is full of anti trans sentiment is complete fabrication, of course.
Troubled Blood was named Crime Thriller Book of the Year by the British Book Awards. I liked it a great deal. I have the next book on pre-order.
guest @ 1 – in what vicinity?
The idea that her books have predominantly white characters is interesting…I have some experience that speaks to that. (I don’t know if they are; I’ve never read them.)
One thing I learned as a playwright is that all white women are expected to write maximally diverse plays – center everybody, except of course any white woman characters. Make sure you have adequate mixtures of ethnicities, races, and an abundance of trans.
Then submit your play. Stand back and wait. The angry rant that follows that you, a white woman, dared to appropriate the stories of marginalized groups. The idea that you have any right to cover those groups…you will be denounced as evil. Of course, you will also be denounced as evil if you write without including all those groups.
The real moral? White women should not write. Anything. Ever. Because…well, white woman. (I say this because I have not seen any similar outrage flung at white men, or for that matter, any men.) This in spite of the fact that actually the most marginalized group in theatre, at least in playwriting, is white women. We have a much smaller representation in relationship to our percentage in the population, than any other demographic, with white women representing about half as many produced plays as our percentage of the population. Writers of color, especially black, are represented at just slightly over their percentage in the population; the one exception is Asian, which is lower, but not by as much as half.
The idea seems to be that when a white woman gains something, it is at the expense of people of color. In fact, in theatre, you could bring white women to par without removing a single person of color, since white men are represented at approximately (slightly over) twice their percentage in the population. Any surprises? No. But…white women must not write without diversity or they are evil. They must not write with diversity, because then they are evil.
tl;dr White women should not write.
If the 21C has taught us anything, it is that so many of our “cultural icons” are just like ourselves. Flawed, often nasty, sometimes inhumane, given to hubris, and overly self-important.
Over the weekend I decided to rewatch “Kill Bill”, and had a slight shudder as the name Harvey Weinstein appeared on the screen. But should that stop me from watching a movie, because of the transgressions of this one man? Or do I somehow separate the art from the creator? I watched.
That is what the MoPOP seem to be trying to do. But they are failing, because they don’t want to separate the views of the artist from the art; they want the artist hanged, drawn, quartered, burned at the stake, and the ashes fed to Smaug!
(No, I am not equating Weinstein with JKR)
So much of the hatred of JKR from the TRA/MRA/Incel Alliance is that she is untouchable. They cannot get her sacked, they cannot get her defunded, they cannot cause her any harm at all. And she gives them the biggest middle finger of all by using a portion of her wealth to fund women-only services
Re Cormoran Strike novels.
The first was just OK, but the subsequent ones were each a little better than the first. Until the ultimate novel; I just could not get past the first 20%, the style was all wrong, the voice was gone, and it was a mishmash that read like an attempt to paint IRL foes as evil rather than telling a tale.
I had hopes for Robin and Cormoran, did they get together in the end?
I don’t know if it was in the books, but there is a scene in Deatrhly Hollows, Part II where Voldemort demands that Hogwarts hand over Harry. One student from Slytherin points to Harry and says there he is, grab him, but takes no action. No one else from Slytherin says or does anything. No matter. McGonigle orders Filch to take them to the dungeon. A quarter of the school’s enrollment in the dungeon, who needs a school-to-prison pipeline?
@4 near the Museum of Pop Culture.
@5 I’ve certainly noticed the discrepancy between the demands for women’s cultural products to be ‘inclusive’ and the lack of demands for men’s – years ago I pointed out in something I’d written about a memoir written by a man that if a woman had written it the reviews would be all about how she had neglected to centre the experience of women with different demographic characteristics than her. But I hadn’t spotted the ostensible justification for this double standard: ‘The idea seems to be that when a white woman gains something, it is at the expense of people of color.’
Huh? Isn’t it usually ‘he/him’ or ‘they/them’? The mixture of singular and plural pronouns they have chosen for himselves would make speaking of them even clumsier than the confusing mess created when speaking of an individual in the plural alone. It appears that they have decided that he wants to have their cake and eat it, too.
And, yes, it did hurt my brain just typing that.
As for the lack of diversity claims, I have neither read the Potter books nor watched the movies, but as such claims are made about pretty much everything these days I feel confident in making a few observations*.
First, and the simplest to deal with, is the fat shaming. The stories are about children and children are cruel. Fat shaming is a common – maybe the most common form of bullying among children, so in this respect the stories are reflecting reality**.
Not having read the books I don’t know exactly what is meant by the accusation that Rowling used racial stereotypes, but it does seem to be a strange claim to make in the same sentence that accuses her of creating an ‘incredibly white’ wizarding world. About whom is she creating those racial stereotypes if there”s no racial diversity? That leads into her ‘support of antisemitic creators’ which I assume means the movies’ creative teams who made the house elves (?) stereotypically Jewish. If so, it raises a couple of questions, the first being whether Rowling actually described the characters in such terms in the books or if it was the creative teams who made them so. If the latter, how much creative control would Rowling have had over their depiction in the movies?
As for the ‘incredible whiteness’ and lack of [letter salad] inclusion, is the complaint that Rowling specifically introduced each character as white, straight and gender-conforming or that she didn’t specify either colour, race, sexuality or gender identity for every character? In short, is Moore making assumptions based on no information?
And finally, there’s
Why do I get the urge to translate this as “I have stamped my feet, yelled, cried and accused the Curatorial team of being on the side of the transphobes, but the best I could extort from them was the removal of Rowling’s name”?
*Beyond the obvious one that virtually nobody had noticed anything particularly problematic in this department until JKR ripped off the mask and exposed herself as a raging transphobe’ (hyperbole much?). Even those who would now be happy to see Rowling hanging from the gallows were once among the masses gushing over the fantasy world, placing themselves into the various houses and cosplaying the crap out of the Potter universe. Hypocritical bastards!
**Speaking of reality, a phrase that jumped out at me was “don’t fit into the standard wizarding world”. Is there a ‘standard wizarding world’ or have the identifarians so lost their grip on reality that absolutely anything goes nowadays? Is that a rhetorical question,?
AoS, I see that “standard wizarding world” as referring to the world she created. Since it is a book series, there need to be consistent rules and formulations for the operation of the world.
I’ve been writing a fantasy series about witches, and one thing I have to do is standardize the world I’ve created; I can’t do something in one book that I state is impossible in another, even if it would make my job as a novelist easier. I have created a series of characters that appear regularly in every book, and I have to make sure they stay in character.
So the Harry Potter world, created in part in the first book, would be the ‘standard wizarding world’. Of course, since these accusations are made by trans advocates, they are already accepting one fantasy, so perhaps they’ve bought into the idea she is documenting a real world.
guest @ 8 – ah! How interesting. Do tell us more if and when it’s safe to!
iknklast @ 11 – AoS didn’t say “standard wizarding world” but “‘incredibly white’ wizarding world” – referring to MoPop’s Chris Moore’s rebuke of JKR’s “incredibly white wizarding world.”
iknklast, I can understand the phrase as used in the limited sense of one author’s work but in this instance Potter-related artefacts are being exhibited as part of a wider exhibition of ‘Fantasy: Worlds of Myth and Magic’. In that context, Moore’s words could be read as saying that there is a standard ‘wizarding world’ across the entire genre and that JKR’s work is somehow in violation of the rules of that world. To me that implies the idea that the general wizarding world is something akin to the world of the identity crowd – a fantasy world that is taken too literally and needs protecting from reality by the imposition of strict rules of, as our inimitable host phrases it, ‘inclooshun’.
Something else has just occured to me. Admittedly, I have no real interest in fantasy fiction so I’m making a stab in the dark here, but I seriously doubt that the letter salad is a feature of most work in that genre, and that would I’m sure apply to a lot more of the exhibition than just Rowling’s contribution. If that is the case, it seems obvious that it isn’t the work itself that is problematic as Moore claims; logically, if it were it would have been obvious from the moment JKR’s first Potter novel was released and in all likelihood the sequels would never have been written, or at the very least would not have become the great success story that they did. From that it follows that there would be no Potter section in the exhibition to complain about. It’s obvious that it is Rowling herself who is viewed as problematic and the problems have been retrofitted to her work. If that wasn’t the case, then every author’s and filmmaker’s work would have been pre-screened for trans inclusion (transclusion?) and the exhibition would be a lot smaller.
OB, #13 – iknklast was referring to my second footnote:
Ohhh; beg pardon iknklast. Weird, because I used ctrl-f to see if I’d missed the “standard” and it came up with zero…I must have made a typo without noticing.
I think universities had better get busy creating whole new departments to go through pre-21st century writing of all kinds to check for criminal lack of incloosivity.
Oh, God! Don’t give them any more ideas.
You know they’re already working on it.
Every department already has or soon will have its own DEI commissar.
Maybe the universities should have a Department of Thought Control, just to make sure no one is thinking incorrect thoughts. They catch you looking at the corner of your eye at a trans person, and you can be busted based on the fact that you were obviously having a hateful thought.
Then there is the Department of Censorship, which would make sure no one is writing down incorrect thoughts in public places.
Colleges would love that; it would allow them to hire still more administrators, plus staff for the administrators, plus build offices and get copy machines and computers for the administrators…it goes on and on. Then they wouldn’t have money to hire new faculty, so a double win, since most university administrators appear to hate having faculty. As soon as they figure out a way to outsource that, I’m sure they will. And that’s probably coming, with so many classes moving to online. Or just get AI to do it…you don’t have to pay them.
@12 all I know is what I’ve read on Ovarit:
https://ovarit.com/o/GenderCritical/433390/seattle-museum-of-pop-culture-airbrushes-jk-rowling-out-of-harry-potter-exhibiti/5cb82d18-de7f-4755-9e63-66724d4fb71d#comment-5cb82d18-de7f-4755-9e63-66724d4fb71d
Ah!
I don’t live far from there either. Maybe one day I should mosey on down and look for the stickers.
@23 Share some photos if you see them :)
I have read all the Harry Potter books (my twins grew up with him, one book at a time, and I read the books to them as bedtime stories) and I thought that Hermione Granger was black. There are some characters whose non-white races can be deduced from their names (the Patel twins, for example), but in Britain it’s not unusual for babies of all races to be given names which are popular and common to all, so if the reader is assuming from the lack of a specific racial description that a minor character is white, that’s down to their prejudices, not the books.
Even the films aren’t as devoid of characters from different races as the critics imply.