Hot for Teacher: Intergenerational Desire, Harry Potter, and the Case of Snarry

Although teacher–student relationships are currently taboo, the Harry Potter texts exhibit palimpsestic traces of both the homosociality and the student–teacher romances common to early school-story texts. These traces have likely inspired the popularity of same-sex teacher–student pairings such as Harry Potter/Severus Snape (‘Snarry’) in fanfiction published online. But what precisely do the fan authors and readers of these texts find interesting about them, and how do they justify their desire to produce and consume these texts within a society that considers same-sex intergenerational relationships – and particularly those between students and teachers–deviant? This article explores interviews with several fan authors of Snarry, published on the communal blog The Snarry Reader, as well as fan readers' reviews of fanfiction published on the Snarry-dedicated website Walking the Plank, to shed light on fan authors' and readers’ motivation to read and write Snarry.