Witch, Please: Queer Theory
Harry Potter and the Sacred Text
Vanessa Zoltan, Casper ter Kuile & Ariana Nedelman
4.7 • 6.8K Ratings
🗓️ 15 April 2021
⏱️ 61 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
We have one more week off between seasons of Harry Potter and the Sacred Text! While we're off, we thought we'd share a recent episode from our sister show, the brilliant feminist Harry Potter podcast Witch, Please.
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We have an episode for you that, in our professional opinion, is very gay. And by gay we mean inviting expansively, radically, resistantly queer readings of a text that is trying very very hard to perform heterosexuality and binary gender! We breeze by the obvious details—like Lockhart's character flaws as coded within his failure to correctly perform masculinity or Harry & Draco's flagrant obsession with each other—and into some of this text's more subversive queer potentials.
This episode acknowledges the existence of sex, so use discretion if in the company of young ears! This episode also discusses the continued abuse of Harry by the Dursleys, so take care of yourselves.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi everybody, I am very excited to tell you about a pilgrimage that I get to go on. |
| 0:06.2 | We will be treating Emily Dickinson's poetry as sacred, an Amherst Massachusetts on July |
| 0:13.6 | 14th to July 17th. |
| 0:15.6 | But also that sounds like an amazing pilgrimage, an amazing set of poetry to treat his sacred. |
| 0:23.7 | I can't think of anything that would make it more amazing. |
| 0:25.7 | I can't think of any two people who might be coming on this trip. |
| 0:28.9 | Who could make this trip more amazing? |
| 0:30.5 | Well, you may have heard of them that they are the people who you think in the first |
| 0:35.2 | paragraph of your acknowledgements in your book. |
| 0:38.0 | They are the people who, along with you, helped design this podcast, Amy Hollywood and |
| 0:43.3 | Stephanie Palsell, who have actually taught a class at Harvard Divinity School, reading |
| 0:47.6 | Emily Dickinson's poetry closely. |
| 0:50.1 | The Emily Dickinson class was one of the most popular and successful classes at HDS |
| 0:54.1 | in like the last three years. |
| 0:55.3 | This is Stephanie and Amy are brilliant and wonderful and funny and kind and excellent |
| 1:00.6 | teachers and because the poetry is so rich. |
| 1:03.8 | We're going to be eating delicious food. |
| 1:05.6 | We're going to be going to Emily Dickinson's house and the Dickinson Museum and looking |
| 1:09.8 | at some of the texts that she hand wrote that are Amherst. |
| 1:14.1 | We're going to be having a really immersive and beautiful experience. |
| 1:17.1 | So everyone, you can find out more at readingandwalkingwith.com. |
| 1:21.4 | That is readingandwalkingwith.com spaces limited but I hope that many of you can join us |
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