Queerness in Rick Riordan’s Mythological Fantasy
Rick Riordan’s children’s fantasy The House of Hades (2013) revealed the first queer child in mainstream children’s fantasy: Nico di Angelo, the demigod son of Hades. Though Riordan’s novels revolve around largely Greco-Roman mythology, as well as Norse and Egyptian, The House of Hades was the first time queer themes from mythology made an appearance in his works. Since The House of Hades, Riordan’s novels have featured gay, bisexual, and transgender characters. Apollo, who is often seen as bisexual, narrates The Trials of Apollo as a teenage boy, and the god Loki both fathers and mothers children in Magnus Chase and the Gods of Asgard. Riordan uses mythology to challenge readers’ perception of sexual and gender identity, enhancing the celebration of diversity: that everyone deserves to be a hero.
According to Kerry Mallan, a major feature of queer literature is the “narrative processes that draw readers’ attention to the incoherencies of
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In Brent Hartinger’s criticism of I’ll Get There. It Better Be Worth The Trip, he says of contemporary queer literature, “a character’s gayness is usually simply something that reinforces whatever the book’s central theme happens to be” (212). Riordan’s queer characters reinforce the celebration of diversity that is present throughout all of his works. While Percy Jackson and the Olympians began as a way to provide children with learning disabilities a role model, Riordan’s more recent novels emphasize that everyone deserves to see themselves represented in literature—not as a lesson or an educator, but as a fully-formed character. Riordan explores the intersection of modern identity politics with mythology that existed before such notions existed, mixing not only queer identity with mythology, but race and religion as
Author: Walter Benn Michaels is the chair of the Department of English at the University of Illinois at Chicago teaching literary theory, and American literature. Michaels has also has multiple essays and books published such as Against Theory, The shape of the Signifier, and Diversity's False Solace
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John Moss, Sexuality and Violence in the Canadian Novel. p. 103 Robertson Davies. The Fifth Business. p. 217.
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Since the dawn of the Victorian Era, society has perpetuated unrealistic gender performance ideals that supposedly find their roots within biological sexual differences. Judith Butler has spent a lifetime seeking to break the mold todays social constructions, specifically surrounding gender and sexuality. The theory this pioneer pegged is now known as Queer Theory, and brought forth in the education system through Queer Studies courses. In the text Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality by author Anne Fausto-Sterling, gender and sex are similarly challenged on both a social and biological level. When reviewing Fausto-Sterling’s work in conjunction with Queer Studies and Human Sexuality, an efficient and effective format is loosely based upon a Critical Literary analysis.
Parker, Robert Dale. How to Interpret Literature: Critical Theory for Literary and Cultural Studies. New York: Oxford, 2011. Print.
Women have given birth to new generations for centuries and have the common stereotype of being caring and gentle. But in the creation myth, women were given to man as a punishment. In the book of collected Greek tales, " Mythology Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes", by Edith Hamilton, women take up important roles that shape each story. Although women are usually characterized as being helpful and motherly, Greek mythology, on the other hand, portrays them to cause distress, fear, and anxiety to numerous men. Women’s actions are shown to be influenced with jealousy and vengeance which gives them an evil nature.
However, Gawain's journey away from Camelot and back is framed by references, in the first and last stanzas, to the journeys into exile of Aeneas and of Brutus, the legendary founder of Britain, that complicate this apparent opposition. As this paper will argue, this framework complicates the poem's presentation of gender and sexuality. Rather than a clear opposition between, say, marital sexuality and everything else, we find a situation in which potentially adulterous acts and kisses among men are vested with varied--and shifting--values. The poem uses references to the (imagined) British past to complicate any simple reading of the tale it tells in terms of sexual morality or transgression.1
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. "Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading; Or, You're So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Introduction is About You." Novel Gazing: Queer Readings in Fiction. Ed. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. Durham: Duke UP, 1997. 1-37.
Guerin, Wilfred L. A Handbook of Critical Approaches to Literature. New York: Harper & Row,
Gay suggests another way characters within pop culture are portrayed as unlikable or at least not powerful, is by being a person of color. As stated earlier, there exists a narrow conceptualization of womanhood and femininity, which primarily mirrors the privileged class, which dominates pop culture in terms of the books we read, television we watch, ads we consume, heroines we aspire to be, and music we listen to. However there does exist different identities of what it means to be a woman. In Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens. Cathy J. Cohen imagines the contemporary view and power of women to be in relation to their homogenized identity. This meaning, to be a woman also depends on other factors of identity; to be a woman in relation to if you are poor or rich, black or white, gay or straight, queer or fall into the dominant class. Luckily, this understanding of womanhood has somewhat expanded. The scope of racial expansion somewhat increases by moving to include Gay’s idolized Black Miss America. Unfortunately, this expansion follows the privilege trend where only a certain type of green girl is able to satisfy the role of Black Miss America. A large issue that Gay has with representation of women of color is that they are tokenized, they are stereotyped, and they are grossly generalized. Instead of this poor misrepresentation of women of color, both Gay and Cohen seek, “a new political direction and agenda, one that does not focus on integration into dominant structures but instead seeks to transform the basic fabric and hierarchies that allow systems of oppression to persist and operate efficiently” (Cohen 165). Gay concludes that inclusion of women of color in pop culture fails to portray them as more than one dimensional characters. This lack of depth is attributed to the lack of respect that women of color face in real life as well. While the
As David Ibata said himself, “I believe the issue is not whether Tolkien or Jackson intended to offend.they did not”. Works Cited Enright, Nancy. That is a great idea. “Tolkien’s females and the defining power.”
An Essay: On Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey, Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights, and William Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing
Abcarian, Richard, Marvin Klotz, and Samuel Cohen. Literature: the Human Experience. Boston, MA: Bedford/St. Martins, 2010. Print.