Episode 128 - Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Mike Newell, 2005) (with Taylor Driggers)
The Fantasy/Animation podcast takes listeners on a journey through the intersection between fantasy cinema and the medium of animation. Available via Apple Podcasts, Spotify and many of your favourite podcast hosting platforms!
Chris and Alex continue their journey through the world of Harry Potter for Episode 128 of the podcast, looking at the fourth instalment Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Mike Newell, 2005) accompanied by special guest Dr Taylor Driggers. Taylor is an academic researcher specialising in fantasy literature, theology and religious studies, gender, and sexuality, whose PhD in English Literature from the University of Glasgow focused on fantasy literature’s potential to offer queer and feminist re-visionings of Christian theology and religious practices. His first book was titled Queering Faith in Fantasy Literature and was published by Bloomsbury in 2022 as part of its Perspectives on Fantasy series. Listen as they discuss queer fandom and the connected controversies surrounding J.K. Rowling that have emerged since the conclusion of the big-screen franchise; Harry, Ron, and Hermione’s processes of gendered ‘becoming’ and overlaps with the early-2000s U.S. teen movie cycle; the role of the Triwizard Tournament in shaping the Goblet of Fire’s particular image of both heroic and marginal bodies; the heterospectacle of the Yule Ball and images of coupling; and what it means to re-negotiate the spectatorial pleasures of popular media in ways that might take the text away from the original author.
**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**
**As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts**
Suggested Readings
Driggers, Taylor. 2019. “Archaeologies of the Future: Deconstruction, Fantasy, and the Fiction of Ursula K. Le Guin.” The New Americanist 1, no.3 (Autumn): 103-128, available here.
Driggers, Taylor. 2018. “The Stripped Banner: Reading The Fall of Arthur as a Post-World War I Text.” In The Inklings and King Arthur, ed. Sørina Higgins, 239-250. Berkeley, CA: Apocryphile Press.
Driggers, Taylor. 2013. “Modern Medievalism and Myth: Tolkien, Tennyson, and the Quest for a Hero.” The Journal of Inklings Studies 3, no. 2 (October): 133-152.
Gill-Peterson, Jules. 2018. Histories of the Transgender Child. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Gossett, Reina, Eric Stanley, and Johanna Burton, eds. 2017. Trap Door: Trans Cultural Production and the Politics of Visibility. Massachussetts: The MIT Press.