If you want to try to cite Death of the Author, it helps if they’re actu­al­ly dead. And J.K. Rowl­ing is a lit­tle bit like the tox­ic mold on her own wall—she’s alive and spread­ing like ran­cid musty evil in search of old cheese…

It nev­er fails. A writer does some­thing hor­ri­ble, and their defend­ers sud­den­ly become these absolute experts on Roland Barthes’s Death of the Author and the art/artist divide. They pop their mon­o­cle in and begin instant­ly to wax intel­lec­tu­al on the frailty of the human con­di­tion and the way that art can be loved with­out nec­es­sar­i­ly sup­port­ing the author in their per­son­al beliefs—two per­spec­tives that, as an artist and a fol­low­er of fan­doms, I have to tell you, are notice­ably fuck­ing lack­ing until some­one points out that the way a per­son is con­sum­ing media that is active­ly harm­ful is pret­ty shit­ty.

It’s usu­al­ly kind of sad because peo­ple could just do what­ev­er they want­ed to do in the pri­va­cy of their own home. They could watch the Har­ry Pot­ter series, and no one could stop them. No one would even know.

But what they want isn’t just to see it. They want abso­lu­tion for WANTING to see it. They want to go back to the hal­cy­on days of tak­ing quizzes to fig­ure out what house they’re in and doing all this in-depth analy­sis about why the char­ac­ters zigged instead of zagged. They want the memes back, and the GIFS of Dum­b­le­dore danc­ing and the Hog­warts cos­play… all that shit that gave their lives mean­ing in the ear­ly aughts.

And they real­ly, REALLY don’t want to feel bad about it. They’re not just want­i­ng to see it. They’re want­i­ng every­one around them to SHUT THE FUCK UP with any­thing that harsh­es their squee.

Humans are mas­ters at ratio­nal­iza­tion.

We feel the emo­tion­al reac­tion first and often take the action before we’ve thought it through, and then run around behind those emo­tion­al deci­sions and try to jus­ti­fy them with a veneer of log­ic. When the emo­tion is “I want to enjoy this thing that is prob­lem­at­ic,” there are sud­den­ly a mil­lion rea­sons it isn’t THAT prob­lem­at­ic.

My expe­ri­ence has always been that the sep­a­ra­tion of art and artist is and has always been an intense­ly per­son­al deci­sion. Inspir­ing prob­lem­at­ic artists have always exist­ed, and as much as we want to, we can nei­ther undo some­one’s harm nor reach back into our child­hoods or young adult­hoods (or even last week) and make cer­tain media be NOT for­ma­tive to who we are. Vir­ginia Woolf was a racist. Bradley was a pedophile. John Green glo­ri­fies tox­ic rela­tion­ships as roman­tic. Stephen King isn’t as bad as he used to be, but he still shows his ass when he talks about diver­si­ty in sto­ries (while writ­ing yet anoth­er “mag­i­cal negro” trope). And hon­est­ly, it’s hard to come up with an “ism” or “pho­bia” that you could­n’t find Shake­speare guilty of.

Most of us suck. Some of us suck, and yet make beau­ti­ful things.

I have always always ALWAYS tak­en the posi­tion that it is impor­tant to under­stand these things and lis­ten to oth­ers. That an artist means a lot to one per­son nev­er means they are excul­pat­ed from their hurt­ful behav­iors to anoth­er, and whether you con­sid­er it an impor­tant part of the post-struc­tur­al analy­sis of a good lit­tle writer or you just want to make sure you’re not being a will­ful­ly obliv­i­ous ass­hole, under­stand­ing that art and artist can NEVER be vac­u­um-sealed away from each oth­er is vital to one’s rela­tion­ship to either—and to one’s own work (because your bull­shit is going to come up in your work too, so you bet­ter unpack it).

That, and “the death of the author” is a lot more mean­ing­ful when the author is actu­al­ly… dead, and not when they’re in your social media feed, using their plat­form to attack a mar­gin­al­ized com­mu­ni­ty. Read­er response—which, by the way, isn’t a Get Out of Jail Free card for tak­ing zero respon­si­bil­i­ty for one’s con­sump­tion choices—doesn’t even say that. It’s a lit­er­ary analy­sis tool that says that once a work is out in a com­mu­ni­ty, the author’s INTENT is no longer the most impor­tant part of how the work is read. And var­i­ous com­mu­ni­ties can respond to the work by point­ing out how it IMPACTS them.

It’s basi­cal­ly the coun­ter­point to all the obnox­ious peo­ple who say “Well, that’s not what the author MEANT.”

Which is actu­al­ly kind of the oppo­site of try­ing to use read­er response to exon­er­ate the art from how it makes mar­gin­al­ized groups feel. Yes, indeed, my lit­er­ary ana­lyz­ing friends, read­er response as the ele­va­tion of the spe­cif­ic crit­i­cisms of how a work land­ed on a com­mu­ni­ty over autho­r­i­al intent is not real­ly the same as, “Shut the fuck up, com­mu­ni­ty that this work active­ly harms. I hap­pen to like this… and I’m a read­er.”

I know it’s hard to believe, but it’s true! You can’t even read the dust jack­et of Death of an Author thor­ough­ly and come away with that bull­shit inter­pre­ta­tion.

And yeah, okay, there’s no eth­i­cal consumption…blah blah blah. But we’re not talk­ing about, like, reg­u­lar run-of-the-mill uneth­i­cal con­sump­tion under cap­i­tal­ism. If you watch an MCU movie, you are sup­port­ing Dis­ney and tac­it­ly endors­ing things like labor exploita­tion, suing day cares for hav­ing Mick­ey on the walls, or low­balling home­own­ers to get cheap prop­er­ty on which to build parks. Not to men­tion the fact that you are buy­ing into a par­a­digm of Über­men­sch defend­ing the sta­tus quo against vil­lains who are often sort of mak­ing pret­ty decent points about the ills of late-stage cap­i­tal­ism, glo­ri­fi­ca­tion of the mil­i­tary indus­tri­al com­plex, and a fair­ly white male cis het rep­re­sen­ta­tion.

THAT’S “prob­lem­at­ic.” That’s between you and you. I can’t tell you what to decide, espe­cial­ly when you have actu­al­ly decent offer­ings with­in the MCU, try­ing to deal with issues like sur­veil­lance states, grief as a metaphor, white suprema­cy and refugees, and trau­ma. You have to decide what degree of prob­lem­at­ic prax­is you’re will­ing to tol­er­ate, and just how much exploita­tion behind the cam­era you can stom­ach before you’re okay that you’re not going to get three movies and four series this year.

Rowl­ing isn’t even your run-of-the-mill prob­lem­at­ic author out there. For exam­ple, Orson Scott Card who wrote a beloved sci­ence fic­tion clas­sic that was turned into an eye-pop­ping spe­cial effects-palooza (that I still haven’t watched) while he stands with his Mor­mon brethren in the Church of Jesus Christ of Lat­ter-day Saints in vocal­ly sup­port­ing quite revolt­ing lev­els of homo­pho­bia. Are you going to boy­cott any­thing a Mor­mon writes? There are quite a few of them.

But what Rowl­ing does isn’t mem­ber­ship in a group that HAS harm­ful beliefs….

No, what Rowl­ing does is on a whole oth­er fuck­ing lev­el. She’s on the front line. It’s harm­ful beyond my abil­i­ty to prop­er­ly artic­u­late it. Rowl­ing’s fem­i­nism took a decid­ed­ly rad­i­cal trans-exclu­sion­ary path in 2019 (2018 if you believe that the “mis-liked tweet” she blamed on clum­si­ness may not have been so much of a mis­take), and since then she has been lim­it­ed only by her imag­i­na­tion and the tech­nol­o­gy of the day in how low she can descend into being an absolute human feces fire—which is a step worse than the human tire fire she was before.

Rowl­ing takes the mon­ey FROM Har­ry Pot­ter, goes out, and LEADS THE CRUSADE against the trans com­mu­ni­ty through her Rowl­ing Wom­en’s Fund. This is some­one who uses her CONSIDERABLE finan­cial resources from the Har­ry Pot­ter intel­lec­tu­al prop­er­ty to fund fur­ther polit­i­cal action to roll back pro­tec­tions and direct­ly attack trans folks.

This is not art that can be sep­a­rat­ed from the artist. She has made that absolute­ly impos­si­ble.

And yes, every time the media moves to movies, we start to get these guilt-fling­ing screeds about those POOR peo­ple behind the cam­era. But I have a ques­tion for you about that.

Did you watch Mela­ni­a’s doc­u­men­tary? Did you watch Amer­i­can Sniper? Did you watch 13 Hours: The Secret Sol­diers of Beng­hazi? Did you watch every movie ever made and every series on every stream­ing plat­form?

Then it’s not real­ly about sup­port­ing the lit­tle peo­ple behind the cam­era, is it? I mean, you should be watch­ing absolute­ly every­thing if that’s what it’s about. But it’s not, is it? You are in choice about what you pri­or­i­tize in front of your eye­balls. We all have to triage our time when it comes to media, and you have decid­ed to watch Har­ry Pot­ter instead of some­thing new on Net­flix or Hulu. IT’S ABOUT WHAT YOU WANT TO WATCH. It’s about a paper-thin jus­ti­fi­ca­tion that you came up with AFTER the emo­tion­al deci­sion was already made.

You’re not going to get your abso­lu­tion from the trans com­mu­ni­ty. And you’re not going to get it from me. There are ten bil­lion hours of only vague­ly prob­lem­at­ic media for you to con­sume. In allow­ing your child­hood nos­tal­gia to out­rank the promise that the mon­ey made will be devot­ed to attack­ing a mar­gin­al­ized com­mu­ni­ty, you bla­tant­ly expose your pri­or­i­ties.

A whole lot of peo­ple need to make their fuck­ing peace with the fact that they aren’t being a good per­son in this moment and that it is absolute­ly the trans com­mu­ni­ty’s right to call them out on it. They should­n’t com­pound it by mak­ing it every­one else’s prob­lem to absolve them.