among other reasons I would like schools and particularly humanities to be better funded, I am very tired of seeing children say "this character is queer coded" when what they MEAN is "I have a queer reading of this character"

also your cishet fave is not queercoding anything, they're putting in a mix of homophobia and plausibly deniable queer baiting bc they want to make money out of both anti-queer bigots and queer people desperate for representation at the same time

eg JKR using lycanthropy as a metaphor for AIDs, depicting remus lupin as disloyal, desperate to abandon his wife and newborn child, and also his origin story being that a slavering, predatory man attacked him as a child

is NOT queercoding. its just homophobia. hope that helps

queercoding is when the author encodes queerness in the text without stating it explicitly. historically, this has been done to avoid censorship of the text - for example, Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray heavily implies the intimate relationships

even having undergone certain edits, it was still explicit enough that it was used as evidence in his trial, where he was later sentenced to years of hard labour for the crime of having sex with other men.

this is why "child-coding", "sibling coding" etc are NOT the same - when we say CODING, we are talking about the author intentionally putting in implicit meaning, because it is unsafe for the author to state it explicitly, or to circumvent censorship of queerness

coding is all to do with authorial intent, where the author is likely to be a target of attack or censorship if they state things explicitly - again this is why cishets baiting fans into thinking a ship might be canon is also NOT queercoding.

you can interpret the text however you want! you can do a reading of the text through a specific lens - eg a queer reading of a certain character or set of themes - but these are subjective analyses based off of your position on the evidence. that is a different thing.

people might have different positions of a text, and even queercoding can be subjective - for example, I would argue that Wodehouse was queercoding in his Jeeves series, particularly with the relationship between Jeeves and Wooster, but others might disagree with me

but the 21st century Teen Wolf or Supernatural, for example, is NOT queercoded. those are just queerbaiting - implying queerness to mock fans whilst also giving them false hope for genuine representation that ultimately is never fulfilled in a satisfactory or genuine way

speaking of essays and critical analysis here's some thoughts I had today on why it's important to have them and to enjoy having them outside of academic or professional environments: https://twitter.com/JohannesTEvans/status/1391138526092275713?s=19