Can we ever kill the author?

On JK Rowling, Transphobia, and the Power of the Author

I would like to start this post with a disclaimer that I do not plan to set out and kill any writers; rather, I refer to Roland Barthes’ notion of disassociating the author from their text. I had the pleasure of studying Barthes’ ‘The Death of the Author’ (1967) in my first year of university, and, although I didn’t wholly agree with it, it was a text that provoked a lot of thought about our tendency to put authors up on a pedestal when analysing their work.

Barthes criticises how ‘the explanation of a work is always sought in the man or woman who produced it’, and that ‘to give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing’. While I agree with this to an extent - we are often so obsessed with the influence of the author’s biography on a text that we forget the value of our own interpretation - I also think that the contextual circumstances of a piece of writing can hold valuable insight for its meaning and interpretation.

The relationship between art and artist is still culturally significant today, especially in a time where revelations about previously-lauded creators have come to light, and discussions of ‘cancel culture’ are prominent. But can we ever, as Barthes would have liked us to, remove the artist from their work?

This argument has come back into my mind recently, as at one of my jobs (where I moderate kids’ writing for an online tutoring site) there was a writing competition. Kids had to write about their favourite author and what impact their writing had had on them. To no surprise, about 90% of the kids proclaimed JK Rowling as just this. There is no doubt that Rowling created a truly impressive fictional world which has had a profound impact on popular culture. And, in fact, in my seminar on Barthes we discussed her as an example of Barthes' 'Author-God' through her continued influence via Twitter over reader interpretations of her fictional world. But, I also squirmed slightly as this came just a few months after an uncomfortable online revelation of Rowling’s transphobia.

If you aren’t aware of her comments, in June Rowling wrote a 3000-word long post about protecting the experiences of ‘people who menstruate’, i.e. women. (There is already so much wrong with this idea even before transgender issues come in but I’ll let that slide for the purposes of this post.)

Rowling argues that by doing away with the idea of biological sex we are denying the lived experiences of women in a sexist society. Not only is she wrong - transgender women too face misogyny and sexist abuse, and no one is denying the existence of biological sex, just that it is less binary than we might first have thought - but her statements went on to imply that allowing transgender women to use female public bathrooms would open cisgendered women up to the threat of abusive men. These men, she suggests, would now dress in women’s clothes in order to enter these bathrooms to attack the women in them.

There is so much to unpack here but I have been doing some research to improve my understanding of why this is so harmful and I want to offer the following:

Women can be attacked anywhere by men whether these men are dressed in women’s clothes or not.
Women are more likely to be attacked by someone they know than a stranger in a bathroom.
Transgender women are even more likely to be attacked or abused in public than any cis woman, almost wholly due to this harmful discourse of transphobia that Rowling herself perpetuates.
The idea of transgender women just being crossdressing men is a monumentally harmful stereotype which marginalises the lived experience of transgender women.

The list could go on, but I will include some resources at the bottom of this post for anyone who wants to educate themselves further (as we all should be doing).

As some of the children wrote for this competition that JK Rowling was an ‘amazing person’ as well as a genius author, I couldn’t help but recoil and think how, sometimes, separating art from artist can do more harm than good. Obviously these are just children, but I have seen how Rowling’s attitudes have divided many Potter fans who are now adults like myself. While many, including myself, feel as though that magical childhood world has been tainted, others blindly defend her and her views.

What is even more concerning is that Rowling’s most recent novel, Troubled Blood, revolves around a male serial killer that dresses in women’s clothes. Positioned alongside Rowling’s recent sentiments, this character is especially harmful to the trans community, who have suffered with these misrepresentations of transness, and their effects, in modern media.

Rowling’s author status elevates her sentiments in the eyes of her loyal fans, who are more likely to read this book and thus further solidify their own transphobic views; here, the binding up of author and text is powerful (sorry, Barthes, but perhaps if you'd lived to see the influence of social media on the voice of your Author-God, you might have conceded that they are very much alive).

This misrepresentation is something highlighted in Netflix's Disclosure, a documentary which explores the representation of transgender people in cinema and TV. From Buffalo Bill in The Silence of the Lambs, to the many crossdressing killers of Hitchcock’s filmography, transness has a history of being represented alongside psychosis and murderous tendencies. The perceived threat to mainstream values that transness poses is translated in cinema into a threat to life itself.

And, as Katy Montgomerie emphasises, what’s important to transphobes is the cloaking of these issues in seemingly ‘reasonable’ sentiment: ‘If those opposing trans rights were to just say “we want to take away the rights and freedoms of trans people” they know it’d sound as heinous as it is, so, just like “Race Realism”, the goal is to find something in biology that they can point to and say “see I’m not transphobic, that’s just what the science says”’. Rowling’s cloaking is two-fold: through biological and pseudo-feminist concern in her tweets, and through fictional, stereotypical character tropes, bound up in the fear of male violence, in her novel. If we dissociate the author from the text in this case, are we allowing its harmful intent to go unacknowledged?

Disclosure reveals that 80% of Americans don’t personally know a trans person (and I imagine that it is much the same for the UK). What this means is that 80% of Americans get their understanding of what it means to be transgender from media, be that film, TV, social media, or literature. And when you have a continuing history of misrepresentation such as Rowling’s tweets and novel, ignorance and fear reign supreme.

One of the reasons for Rowling’s retaliation is that she herself has suffered horrendous misogynistic abuse which should never have happened, and I am truly sorry that she went through that. But what she must understand is that the existence of trans women does not invalidate her experience or her right to tell her story; in fact, in weaponising her story in this campaign of ignorance, she is silencing trans women and putting them more at risk of this same abuse. As Jackie Gualtieri states so succinctly: ‘Your story doesn’t give you the right to abuse others’.

So with the telling of stories, we come back to Barthes. Perhaps all works of fiction in some, though sometimes abstract, way are an attempt to tell the author’s own story and experience of the world. We cannot have text without author, as much as it doesn’t really exist without readers either. But with the author, as Rowling demonstrates, comes a whole host of views and prejudices.

As readers, we have to accept our complicity in this triangle between author, text, and interpretation, and recognise when a story is being used for abuse. While the author is alive, our consumption of their work supports their views. The line between artist and art is uncertain and fraught, but it must be drawn and redrawn as we grapple with the morality of consuming art by those who hold harmful views. We should be careful of lauding the personhood of an author purely because they produce great art, while remaining cautiously aware of the influences that they have had over their work’s ideology, and in control of how we interpret this ourselves.

The author will never truly die, so we must learn to grapple with its presence and influence in the works we consume.