Bodily Spectacles, Queer Re-Visions: The Narrative Lives of Harry Potter Slash Online

Abstract

This thesis offers readings of several slash (i.e. homoerotic) fanfiction narratives produced and shared online by members of the Harry Potter fandom. I argue that an understanding of slash fanfiction must be grounded not, as commonly suggested in the literature on slash, in binaristic and essentialized assumptions about the coherence of categories of gender and sexuality, but instead in a highly contextualized consideration of the canon text, fans' shared desires for that text, and a collective memory which, in Potter fandom, centers on diegetic trauma. Through embodied encounters with online texts, the protracted practices of queer reading, and the (re-)telling of queer(ed) stories, the subjectivity of fans changes: slash texts and fandom interactions enable fans not just to read but also to speak differently, to potentially narrate themselves queerly in ways that challenge traditional framings of coherent and legible desire and embodiment.