ABSTRACT
In His Dark Materials, a trilogy comprised of The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife, and The Amber Spyglass, Philip Pullman thematically reimagines the foundational Judeo-Christian mythology concerning human sexuality.1 The battle between God and the rebellious angels, which resulted in Adam and Eve’s expulsion from the Garden of Eden for their loss of innocence and their increased knowledge of sexuality, is reconceived as a modern-day, multidimensional confl ict over the meaning of gender and eroticism. Readers witness in this revisioning of Judeo-Christian epic the salvifi c power of human sexuality to free heroism from gendered infl ection, despite the taboos surrounding adolescent sexuality in much of contemporary western culture.2 Pullman asks his readers to consider how modern paradigms of gender and sexuality refl ect the stultifying infl uence of the Judeo-Christian tradition (rather than any inherent truth therein) and thus inhibit the quest for personal identity and love.3 Eroticism in these novels upsets gendered norms of femininity and masculinity in relation to heroism, and Lyra and Will’s consummation of heterosexual desire promotes a new queer vision of heaven, one based on dismantling normative constructions of gender and sexuality. The novels’ queer investments explore how normativity shifts in relation to various ideological paradigms of gender and identity, which, as William Turner notes, stands as a primary goal of queer theory: “Queer theory is political in its insistence that the unqueer reading of identity-the perpetuation of the idea that individuals somehow ‘naturally’ fi t into purely empirical identity categories-serves to distribute power among persons.”4 His Dark Materials denaturalizes such “purely empirical identity
categories” as male and female, and in so doing, is queerly invested in dismantling heteronormativity even while depicting heterosexuality.
