Museum of Pop Culture removes JK Rowling’s name from exhibit & calls her “a joy-sucking entity”

MoPOP, the Museum of Pop Culture in Seattle, has banished “joy-sucking” JK Rowling from its hallowed halls.

The museum, a respected arbiter of popular art and culture founded by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen in 2000, made the decision based on Rowling’s “hateful and divisive” views.

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In a MoPOP blog post in May under the title “She-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named,” exhibitions project manager Chris Moore explained the museum had “long conversations [regarding] problematic people and content” in the museum’s collection and zeroed in on Rowling and her association with the Harry Potter franchise.

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“While the Harry Potter series is a major player in the pop culture sphere,” Moore wrote, “we wanted to give credit to the work of the actors, prop makers, and costume designers in our Fantasy gallery… which is why you’ll see the artifacts without any mention or image of the author.”

Moore, who calls himself a transgender Harry Potter ex-fanatic, described Rowling as a “cold, heartless, joy-sucking entity.”

The post also called out “antisemitic” tropes Rowling conjured for the Potter series — critics say Gringotts goblins are thinly veiled and xenophobic Jewish stereotypes —as well as an “incredibly white wizarding world” and an absence of LGBTQ+ representation.

Moore wrote the queer community was “concerned for our transgender siblings” amid the rise of transphobic rhetoric in the U.S. and the wave of anti-LGBTQ+ legislation sweeping the country.

He added extricating Rowling from work that she authored is “not a perfect solution, but it’s what we were able to do in the short-term while determining long-term practices.”

The Harry Potter creator has been criticized since the late 2010s over her anti-transgender remarks. Cast members, including Daniel Radcliffe and Emma Watson, have distanced themselves from the author and her views, with Radcliffe making clear to fans, “not everybody in the franchise felt that way.”

A post from 2020 about “people who menstruate,” which Rowling took viral with a gratuitously cruel comment, was condemned by the trans community as particularly insensitive.

For her part, Rowling claims her views have been “profoundly” misunderstood.  

Earlier this year, on the podcast The Witch Trials of JK Rowling, Rowling defended herself, saying, “When I first became interested, then deeply troubled by what I saw as a cultural movement that was liberal in its methods and very questionable in its ideas, I absolutely knew that if I spoke out, many folks would be deeply unhappy with me.”

“Time will tell whether I’ve got this wrong. I can only say that I’ve thought about it deeply and hard and long. I’ve listened, I promise, to the other side, and I believe there is something dangerous about this movement, and it must be challenged.”