The Death of the Author, The Word of God, and the Gay Agenda

When I'm trying to put something off, I suddenly find all kinds of other important things I need to do.  Today I'm putting off, err, getting my nails done, which means that my head is full of fascinating Opinions that I might express.

I have ongoing arguments with friends about Baudrillard.  Yes, I'm one of _those_ sorts of people.  Frankly, I'm not quite sure I can get behind the whole "death of the author" thing.  Not, at least, in such strong terms, at least.  (To be fair, I haven't actually _read_ Baudrillard, in French or in English.  Yes, I'm one of _those_ sorts of people.)

My feeling is that what John Cleese has to say about the meaning of the Argument Sketch should probably carry more weight than what I have to say.

On the other hand, I do feel like what I have to say about the meaning of the Argument Sketch should carry more weight than what Graham Chapman has to say.  This is because Graham Chapman is dead.  In fact, I would argue that the longer it has been since Graham Chapman died, the less weight any opinions he expressed while he is alive should matter.  I would argue that all texts are palimpsests, constantly being written over every time they are read or performed in a different world than the one in which they were created.

Which in turn means that John Cleese's word is not, as TV Tropes might put it, "the word of God".  Certainly I would weight his word, as the author of the sketch, higher the beliefs of some queer American lady who wasn't even born when the sketch was written.  The thing is, that weight applies most specifically to what he meant when writing that sketch, in 1972.  Even if we assume that he can correctly and coherently express that, uh, "original intent", the importance and meaning of that intent is far, _far_ less important than, say, William Rehnquist might have believed.

I don't often read the Onion, but last year I read a very funny Onion article.  Like many Onion articles, most of the humor is in the headline.

https://entertainment.theonion.com/frozen-2-creators-confirm-that-elsa-gay-but-also-tran-1839981134

"‘Frozen 2’ Creators Confirm That Elsa Gay But Also Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist"

That's a pretty sharp critique and one that bears unpacking, I think.

The obvious target here is people who want Elsa to be canonically queer.  This is an argument I see pretty commonly expressed, that sexuality has no place in children's entertainment.

With all due respect, I find this argument to be bullshit.

One of the things that struck me watching Graham Chapman's rant the other day is how much of are norms are defined, explicitly or implicitly, in opposition to "the gay agenda".  It was OK to be gay as long as you were a consenting adult (the age of which, at the time, varied in England depending on whether you were consenting to a homosexual or heterosexual encounter), but the children!  My God, won't somebody think of the children?

Well, heteronormative, cisnormative society surely does spend a lot of time thinking of the children.  I'm not so sure I'm impressed with _what_, precisely, they think of the children.

You know what, I'm gonna redirect here, that's a rant for another time, I think.  Trust me, I _am_ going to get back to that one.  Let's just say that there is, today, a lot of explicitly queer-affirming, GNC-affirming children's entertainment, and from what I can tell, it seems to be doing a lot more good than harm.

On consideration, I think the people who want Elsa to be canon gay, they are right to want that.  They are right to want to be acknowledged, to be seen, to have everyone, yes, _and children_, told explicitly, rather than through subtext and coded messages, that being gay is normal.

So the humor in this, for me, is to imagine the creators giving with one hand and taking away with the other.  Having created an obviously gay character, they choose to simultaneously openly affirm and celebrate what they've done _and_ make that character hateful and awful.

Yes, of course.  Yes, I am thinking of "beloved" children's entertainer J.K. Rowling.  J.K. Rowling, for whom homosexuality is so meaningless and insignificant, so remote from her experience, that she feels comfortable unilaterally declaring a major character in the novels to be queer after the fact.  Now, Dumbledore, look, this isn't an Elsa thing.  It's not like there was a huge fandom petitioning Rowling to please, for the love of God, make Dumbledore canon gay.  There's more slash involving the Sorting Hat than there is involving Dumbledore.  To the extent that there is a queer Harry Potter fandom, Dumbledore certainly doesn't seem to be the focus of it.

I'm sure Rowling doesn't understand any of this.  Doesn't understand why so many queer people were upset when she just said "oh by the way Dumbledore's gay", doesn't understand how she was appropriating and tokenizing queer experience.

Being queer means something to me.  I can't tell my story without that story being informed by my queerness, can't even talk about something as simple as the Modern Lovers album without that being informed by my queerness.  It's pride, it's doubt, it's regret, it's decades of struggle, of fighting for the right to exist, in the face of people who want to make us invisible, want to make us silent, who sometimes explicitly deny our very existence.

People like, you know, J.K. Rowling.

J.K. Rowling's word is not the Word of God.  Please do not treat it as such.