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The Girl, The Myth, The Fanfiction

Harry Potter in Different Languages

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The Archive
The Girl: Why Gender Matters
Upon hearing the words “nerdy” or “geeky,” it’s likely that images of a boy or man in their adolescence or early adulthood come to mind. Many fan scholars discuss this phenomenon in relation to an infamous SNL sketch in which William Shatner tells a group of male Star Trek fans to “get a life.” While media (such as comics, movies, and television shows) fans are often envisioned as male, media fandom itself is gendered as feminine. In the sketch, male fans “are feminized and/or desexualized through their intimate engagement with mass culture,” with Shatner even asking one fan if he’s ever “kissed a girl,” (Jenkins, 10, 2013). “Nerdy” subculture is rarely associated with women despite the fact that other types of fannish behaviors are. “The sexualized fan is almost always female… the feminine side of fandom is manifested in the images of screaming teenage girls who try to tear the clothes of the Beatles or who faint at the touch of one of Elvis’s sweat drenched scarves,” (Jenkins, 2013, 15).

In both depictions of fandom, however, the fannish behaviors are “feminized through either the taint of femininity attached to the fanboy’s ‘failed’ masculinity or the excessive feminine affect assigned to fangirls,” (Scott, 53). This has had important implications for media fan communities as a whole. Over the years, male fans have reclaimed this fannish identity and media franchises have taken note. Women’s oversexualized superhero costumes, the obsession with Princess Leia from Star Wars when she was Jabba the Hutt's slave, and the hypersexualized bodies of teenage Anime characters are just some examples of how popular media, nerdy or otherwise, is tailored to the male gaze.

Women in fan spaces also are often questioned about their authenticity. While “real” nerdy or “gamer” girls are idealized as the perfect girlfriends, one’s who won’t get mad at you for spending all day playing video games, self-proclaimed male nerds have written whole articles on how you can tell if your girlfriend is a “fake gamer girl,” (Amirkhani). This is simply one example of sexism that runs rampant in “nerdy” or “geeky” spaces. Women in fan spaces have written about this extensively, detailing their experiences with sexual harassment and dismissal as well as the new, disconcerting subculture of MRA's or men's rights activists (augustchameleon, Tourjee, Yandura). While many geek spaces are male dominated or at least policed, fanfiction doesn’t suffer from the same problems. A key question, for many, is why?

Fan Fiction Research, a blog that focuses on fanfiction statistics and research, ventured to determine the demographic makeup on fanfiction.net. This was not an easy venture, as fanfiction.net does not track the gender of its users. Through looking at self-identification statistics, around 80% of fanfiction.net users who self identify, self-identify as women (Sendlor). This of course, cannot definitively point to a gender breakdown, but it can support claims that, at the very least, fanfiction is perceived as a predominantly female pastime.

These perceptions matter. Real or not, they have shaped the way figures in fan studies have conceptualized fanfiction. If women, indeed do make up the majority of writers and readers, how can we think about this in conversation with the sexism in media fan spaces? Does it further point to a sexist publishing industry that discounts women’s stories? If the gender breakdown is only perceived, those same questions come to mind, why else would people think that if media fandom is typically associated with men?
The Myth, The Fanfiction: Why Study Harry Potter?
Working with fanfiction requires working within an archive. This archive is incredibly expansive, living on various internet boards and databases. With the many possibilities that come from an archive so large, so too come limitations. Fanfiction.net has over eight million stories alone, while Archive of Our Own boast of over five million original works. Other platforms boast similarly high numbers of stories. With the sheer number of stories to choose from, in a constantly expanding internet archive, how can one possibly study the archive?

In approaching my own project, I asked myself this same question. I decided that it would be altogether impossible to study all fanfiction. On top of scope limitations, not all fanfiction exists on the internet, and not all of it is free. It was then that I decided to narrow my sample size. While there are many different platforms to read fanfiction, the majority of the pieces I work with are on fanfiction.net or Archive of Our Own. This allowed me to work with platforms that have a strong organizational component when it comes to their archives.

In addition to limiting the archives I work with, I limited the scope further by only choosing to work with Harry Potter fanfiction. Though not the first modern fandom by a long shot, Harry Potter has fundamentally changed the way fanfiction and fan culture exists. Concurring with the rise of the internet, Harry Potter remains the best-selling series of all time (Weiss). The series has been translated into over 80 languages, making it a worldwide phenomenon (Wizarding World). The series has spawned musicals, podcasts, an entire genre of music, movies, a theme park, and lots and lots of fanfiction.

There is simply no other fandom that comes close to producing the sheer amount of fan-generated content that Harry Potter has. Finding examples of common tropes within fanfiction is easy within Harry Potter because the archive is so large. There are lists on Buzzfeed of the best Harry Potter fanfiction stories in each subgenre. Further, Harry Potter, like the Twilight fandom that came after, has figures known as “big name fans,” or producers of fan-content that have gained notoriety for their work (Rankin). Cassandra Claire, author of the famous series,The Mortal Instruments, got her start through writing Draco/Harry fanfiction (“Cassandra Claire”). Indeed some of the cast of the movies are big name fans themselves. Chris Rankin, who played Percy Weasley in the series, wrote his university thesis on Harry Potter fan communities. Evanna Lynch, or Luna Lovegood, was, at one time, J.K. Rowling’s pen-pal and later went on to play Luna in an unauthorized parody of the series, A Very Potter Senior Year.

The series is not without its politics. J.K. Rowling, herself, admitted that the “parallels” between Voldemort, the main antagonist, and Hitler, were not accidental (Mutz, 722). In an era of reemerging fascism, it seems as though Harry Potter continues to be relevant and will likely remain so for quite some time. The political nature of the books come with criticisms. While Dumbledore was revealed as gay in 2007 (Siegel), many fans were, and still are, unhappy with the fact that Dumbledore is the only explicitly labeled homosexual character in the books, that this fact is not evident in any of the books, and the fact that he and other characters that may be subtextually gay in the series all die (Tosenberger, 2008).

The series’s relation to the “real world” does not stop there. The character of Harry Potter comes from a long lineage of heroes. Joseph Campbell’s The Hero With a Thousand Faces speaks to our fascination with the archetype of the hero. The Harry Potter series draws out the hero’s journey through Harry’s seven years of education, allowing for readers to grow with him. Harry Potter is “a magical figure growing up within the perimeters of a specific fictional universe that clearly needs new heroes- a need that speaks to the fears and longings of his millennial-era readers,” Mary Pharr writes of Harry Potter’s success, “Harry is the representation of many a “real-time” child’s wishful dream and many an adult’s private yearning for someone to come along and be able to do something to help an imperiled world,” (54). Characters such as the Dursleys, Voldemort, and Dumbledore, only strengthen the archetypal journey that Harry goes on, bringing forth connections to The Odyssey, Lord of the Rings, and even Star Wars (Pharr, 55-61). Returning to the title of this project, Harry Potter is a modern-day myth which, in part, explains the multitude of fanfiction that has come from it.

Like modern Greek gods, characters from our popular culture have come to represent more than just themselves within their own unique stories. Hermione Granger has become a rallying cry for self-identifying “nerdy” girls everywhere, people make comparisons between Voldemort and Trump. For this generation of young adults and teenagers, franchises like Harry Potter, The Hunger Games, and Twilight, have shaped the way they interact with and understand the world. When these characters are taken and reworked in fanfiction, writers are, in a sense, performing new possibilities for them, creating new myths and adventures around our favorite heroes and villains.

It is with Harry Potter’s enormous success, mythological aspects, and political relevance that I choose it as the center of my study. This project utilizes several famous fanfiction stories, four full-length plays, eight movies, multiple tweets, and one podcast to show the way our stories evolve with us and that the way we choose to perform potter says a great deal about who we are.

To Continue on the Sequential Path or Performance Path
Continue to "Fantastic Tropes and Where to Find Them"

To Continue on the Gender Path
Continue to "The Contested Body of Mary Sue"

To Continue on the Rowling Path
Continue to "Queering Hogwarts"