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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   36939 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 22, 2024

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That seems like a reach. Lots of writers use pen names. JK Rowling wasn't trying to pass as a member of the opposite sex, she just chose a gender-neutral pen name mandated by her publisher for fear that young boys would refuse to read a book by a female writer. I've never heard anyone suggest that Mary Ann Evans, Charlotte Brontë, K.A. Applegate or S. E. Hinton were trans men, despite all of them having published books under male pen names (or using their initials to mask their sex, as Rowling did).

the early books were certainly presented in that sort of boy fantasy way.

The suggestion that the act of writing a book whose primary target demographic is members of the opposite sex makes that writer transgender is quite the hot take. Surely this would imply that literally all male romance novelists are trans women, which I'm sure would come as quite a surprise to Nicholas Sparks.

It is a reach, but I disagree that she "wasn't trying to pass as a member of the opposite sex." I think that her publisher and marketers definitely tried to pass her off as a male author (at least in the minds of the 8-12 yr old boys who were the main sales demographic). It was a different time, when the only thing we knew about authors was the book jacket, not like today when we can whip out our phones and instantly look the author, their personal life, and their political views.

Not saying she was transgender, no one thought that. It was just a simpler time when boys wanted to read boys about boys written by men. Or at least, that's what publishers thought.

Counterpoint: several first edition copies of Philosopher's Stone clearly display the name "Joanne Rowling", either on the cover, in the front matter, or in the copyright declaration. At least one author bio on an American first edition refers to her with female pronouns, the honorific "Ms." and identifies her as a "struggling single mother".

If publishers were trying to pass her off as a male writer, they clearly weren't being especially diligent about it.

Who reads the copyright declaration?

My point is, if they were fully committed to the bit and determined to have everyone believe that JK Rowling was a man, the name "Joanne" would not have appeared anywhere in the book (and it wouldn't have been any more difficult for the copyright declaration to list "JK Rowling" rather than "Joanne"). The fact that the name does appear in the book indicates that it was not an elaborate gender-swapping obfuscation à la George Eliot, but a simple gender-neutral pen name.

The source of the claim that "J.K." was due to publisher's influence is Rowling herself. But they probably weren't trying to actually pass her off as a male writer, just to avoid 10-year-old boys seeing "Joanne" on the cover and saying "eww, a girl". (The publisher of the German translation obviously made a different choice)

By the time it became obvious that Harry Potter was attracting readers above its target age range (which was shortly after book 2 came out in the UK and before book 1 came out in the US) "JK Rowling wrote this as a broke single mother" was part of the sales story. So I don't think there was ever a serious attempt to pass.

In a similar vein, Carmen Mola didn't exist and was the pen name for three men and it was only revealed when they won a prize and went to claim it.

The supposed gay male JT LeRoy was a pen name of Laura Albert.

My understanding is that the same is true of Elena Ferrante.

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