Slytherin and Polyjuice
I have very little interest in any of the HBP Polyjuice theories--Draco as Tonks, Narcissa as Tonks, Narcissa as Draco, Tonks as Narcissa. There is only one place in canon where I would be willing to consider it, and that's in the library when the hear someone nearby who's presumably Draco, but then Pince appears around the corner.
It certainly doesn't have to be Draco. He's wearing Pince's clothes if it is, though maybe in robes that's not too big of a deal. The real Pince would have to be somewhere as well. So I'm not making a case that it is really Draco Polyjuiced into Pince, just that it's the only place where I could potentially buy it. What kind of tickles me about it is that previously we'd seen Crouch juice into Moody, and Harry and Ron juice into Crabbe and Goyle. Hermione tried to juice herself into Millicent.
Suddenly in the sixth book--the same book where real sex starts to be important--the Slytherins start using the stuff to gender-swap. Okay really it's just Crabbe and Goyle turning into girls (always into girls!) and the fan theories that include Draco/Pince and Draco/Tonks. But somehow it just seems to fit, doesn't it? There always seems something aggressively male in a funny way about Gryffindor as a concept (the sword, the gryphon, the tower) as opposed to Slytherin (the snake, the ring, the womblike chamber of secrets at the end of the tunnel. Obviously I don't mean that Gryffindors are males--there are plenty of females. It's just if I'm comparing the two houses Slytherin is definitely the more feminine one. Certainly traditional gender roles are the rule of the day in Gryffindor. The girls are independent and deal with boys as equals, but we've still got Hermione the Scarlet Woman in GoF, the sliding stairs to the girl's dorms, the love plots of Romilda, Hermione and Ginny, Ron and the Twins' worries about their sister's reputation, the jokes about Fleur and Bill, Percy's hiding his girlfriend to avoid teasing, Molly and Arthur's classic high school romance, Lily and James' mating dance ("you're a woman, you know what we're like"), Hermione's makeover and a general "Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus" outlook.
Sometimes I think there's just something more feminine about Slytherin--in a neat way, I think, though of course ironically there's no sense of the girls in Slytherin as being always so soft or feminine. Pansy's often more of an ugly charicature of that. At the Yule ball, for instance, Hermione seems more like a "natural woman" while Pansy's overdoing it in pink. In fact Millicent seems to be a joke because she's "no pixie" and the background character boys are hulking. Still, I don't know, I sort of like Slytherin as the more androgynous house--just another way it does all those things you're not supposed to do. It's fluid, the house of emotions and water. Perhaps that's unavoidable when you've got male characters interested in nice clothes (yes, the Malfoys wear nice clothes, not garish ones) and enjoy leaning against things while drawling, and of course I get that the main reason Crabbe and Goyle are changed into girls is just because it's funny--they're big and hulking and now they're little girls. But I somehow have a hard time believing that that joke would be played on or within Gryffindor. Say if the twins were playing around, I doubt they'd juice up in drag a la Bugs Bunny. The only other person I can remember who gets that treatment is Snape via Neville's Boggart and Snape's a Slytherin.
I guess what opens the door to it is the fact that it's not a joke being played by Crabbe and Goyle in HBP. Malfoy *chooses* that disguise for them when he could just as easily turn them into first year boys, right? And they agree to it. Does Draco just think it's safer to go for the exact opposite of the two? In this book above all others, the one where everyone is getting it on? Isn't it actually a hugely big thing that Crabbe and Goyle have experienced here, being in the body of girls, dressing up in school uniforms and whatever they wear under that? I think that's why I love the idea of Draco becoming Pince in the library scene, though as I said I don't think he has to be her. There's just something kind of wonderful about him not only dressing up as her but playing her in that over the top scene calling Harry a "depraved" boy and going on about defilement of books, with the Trio leaving discussing Pince's sex life.
I guess I feel like in some way once you're dealing with Slytherins it's a lot easier to start wondering about gender bending in ways you wouldn't with our Gryffindor heroes, and not just because pre-HBP we had no way of knowing for sure if you could Polyjuice into the opposite gender. Slytherin the house of debauched aristocracy is a silly fandom cliché (though not one I thought went against canon, exactly), but I loved the faint echoes of it I think we did get in HBP.
It certainly doesn't have to be Draco. He's wearing Pince's clothes if it is, though maybe in robes that's not too big of a deal. The real Pince would have to be somewhere as well. So I'm not making a case that it is really Draco Polyjuiced into Pince, just that it's the only place where I could potentially buy it. What kind of tickles me about it is that previously we'd seen Crouch juice into Moody, and Harry and Ron juice into Crabbe and Goyle. Hermione tried to juice herself into Millicent.
Suddenly in the sixth book--the same book where real sex starts to be important--the Slytherins start using the stuff to gender-swap. Okay really it's just Crabbe and Goyle turning into girls (always into girls!) and the fan theories that include Draco/Pince and Draco/Tonks. But somehow it just seems to fit, doesn't it? There always seems something aggressively male in a funny way about Gryffindor as a concept (the sword, the gryphon, the tower) as opposed to Slytherin (the snake, the ring, the womblike chamber of secrets at the end of the tunnel. Obviously I don't mean that Gryffindors are males--there are plenty of females. It's just if I'm comparing the two houses Slytherin is definitely the more feminine one. Certainly traditional gender roles are the rule of the day in Gryffindor. The girls are independent and deal with boys as equals, but we've still got Hermione the Scarlet Woman in GoF, the sliding stairs to the girl's dorms, the love plots of Romilda, Hermione and Ginny, Ron and the Twins' worries about their sister's reputation, the jokes about Fleur and Bill, Percy's hiding his girlfriend to avoid teasing, Molly and Arthur's classic high school romance, Lily and James' mating dance ("you're a woman, you know what we're like"), Hermione's makeover and a general "Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus" outlook.
Sometimes I think there's just something more feminine about Slytherin--in a neat way, I think, though of course ironically there's no sense of the girls in Slytherin as being always so soft or feminine. Pansy's often more of an ugly charicature of that. At the Yule ball, for instance, Hermione seems more like a "natural woman" while Pansy's overdoing it in pink. In fact Millicent seems to be a joke because she's "no pixie" and the background character boys are hulking. Still, I don't know, I sort of like Slytherin as the more androgynous house--just another way it does all those things you're not supposed to do. It's fluid, the house of emotions and water. Perhaps that's unavoidable when you've got male characters interested in nice clothes (yes, the Malfoys wear nice clothes, not garish ones) and enjoy leaning against things while drawling, and of course I get that the main reason Crabbe and Goyle are changed into girls is just because it's funny--they're big and hulking and now they're little girls. But I somehow have a hard time believing that that joke would be played on or within Gryffindor. Say if the twins were playing around, I doubt they'd juice up in drag a la Bugs Bunny. The only other person I can remember who gets that treatment is Snape via Neville's Boggart and Snape's a Slytherin.
I guess what opens the door to it is the fact that it's not a joke being played by Crabbe and Goyle in HBP. Malfoy *chooses* that disguise for them when he could just as easily turn them into first year boys, right? And they agree to it. Does Draco just think it's safer to go for the exact opposite of the two? In this book above all others, the one where everyone is getting it on? Isn't it actually a hugely big thing that Crabbe and Goyle have experienced here, being in the body of girls, dressing up in school uniforms and whatever they wear under that? I think that's why I love the idea of Draco becoming Pince in the library scene, though as I said I don't think he has to be her. There's just something kind of wonderful about him not only dressing up as her but playing her in that over the top scene calling Harry a "depraved" boy and going on about defilement of books, with the Trio leaving discussing Pince's sex life.
I guess I feel like in some way once you're dealing with Slytherins it's a lot easier to start wondering about gender bending in ways you wouldn't with our Gryffindor heroes, and not just because pre-HBP we had no way of knowing for sure if you could Polyjuice into the opposite gender. Slytherin the house of debauched aristocracy is a silly fandom cliché (though not one I thought went against canon, exactly), but I loved the faint echoes of it I think we did get in HBP.