Through "Fan Fiction," the Next Generation of Feminists is Revisiting the Harry Potter Saga

The American publication Vox recently questioned how a sequel to the Harry Potter saga might be received, while rumors regularly circulate about a possible adaptation into a television series format. This question mobilizes the huge international community of fans of the famous wizard, created by the English author J. K. Rowling, whose adventures have also been on the big screen since the early 2000s.

Since her meteoric rise to fame, Rowling has maintained a special relationship with her fans, particularly through her multimedia platform Pottermore.

Rowling is also a very active Twitter personality, where she led a campaign against Trump, for example, along with other self-identified "progressive" writers. Beyond Rowling's opinions, the fight against racism, embodied in the novels by the fight against Voldemort and the Pureblood defenders, drives the plot of all seven books.

This explains both the surprise and disappointment of fans when, last June, Rowling shared opinions deemed transphobic, first on her Twitter account and then in a longer format post on her website.

A brief history of feminism in Harry Potter

The disappointment was all the greater because Rowling is one of the most listened-to and visible feminist figures of the 2000s. She was one of the first women to break into a genre that was long considered to be targeted at male audiences and dominated by men - fantasy. Her example has inspired many young women writers, who in turn have transformed the publishing world by creating the "Young Adult" category (literature targeted primarily at 15-24 year olds).

She is also a spokesperson for several foundations supporting women and children and has revealed that she herself was a victim of domestic violence. In 1992, when the first Harry Potter book was released, the character of Hermione Granger was a turning point in the characterization of girls in fantasy. Far from the stereotypical princess in distress, Hermione's great intelligence is essential to the survival of the trio she forms with Harry and Ron, in which she embodies the voice of logic and rationality.

In 2007, during a public reading, the author declared that Dumbledore - the principal of the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry in which the three heroes live - was gay, drawing support from young fans belonging to the LGBTQIA+ community who saw her as an ally.

Understandably, Rowling has become a feminist pop icon of the 2000s, and her stances are celebrated by the millennial generation, born between the early 1980s and the late 1990s. It is therefore not surprising that Harry Potter has attracted a community of fans committed to the feminist cause in the broadest sense of the word since its advent.

Fans and feminism

But how can we measure the involvement of a community of fans in activist issues, in this case feminist? For Harry Potter, researchers have looked at the vast corpus of fanfiction to classify its activist content. For the uninitiated, fanfiction is fiction that takes fictional elements or characters (in this case, the world of Harry and his friends) and extends or modifies them (as researchers from the University of Pennsylvania explain.)

According to sociologist Jennifer Duggan, the Harry Potter fan community is among the most "engaged" on social issues, notably around the LGBTQIA+ community, anti-racism, and feminism. It is also among the most diverse in terms of authors, including racialized people, queer people, and of course, trans people.

Fanfiction is far from being a niche practice and can be applied to any type of fiction, and it also covers music groups, actors, and other famous personalities. A real literary parallel world, it does not strive for "legitimate" publication, but instead at creating a community around a shared universe.

Like any subculture, fanfiction has its codes and its vocabulary. If it often concerns couples not explored in the original saga, it can also be devoted to secondary characters, parallel universes or alternative endings.

The frequent use of racebending is particularly popular and relevant to the analysis of anti-racism in the community. This term refers to turning a character who in the "canon" (the official story) is white into a racialized person. Fanfiction can also deepen romances that are underdeveloped in the text, and invent some, especially between same-gender characters in fiction that originally featured only heterosexual couples.

This practice offers possibilities of subversion, feminist in the case of Harry Potter, as researcher Anne Kustriz underlines in an article detailing the feminist or antifeminist scope of the fanfiction dedicated to Hermione.

Fourth wave feminism and Harry Potter retellings

Fanfiction is above all the product of the first generation of fans (the millennials) who have read and appropriated the saga through this subculture. While it shows this community's interest in issues of feminist and LGBTQIA+ representation, it remains above all an expression of third-wave feminism, to which the author's generation also belongs.

For this third wave, the main concerns in terms of representation were firstly about the quantity of women and LGBTQIA+ characters present in fanfiction. But there was little critical perspective on the quality of that representation.

Generation Z is marked by fourth-wave feminism, which is primarily driven by concepts developed within black feminism, notably intersectionality. In their demands, these young people continue to demand fiction that includes black, Asian or Latino, neurodivergent or LGBTQ+ characters.

Nevertheless, they especially want to see representation that is perceived as quality, that is, where characters are not just "pretense" characters, present in fiction only as tokens of this supposed diversity, without contributing substantially to the action, often in a very stereotypical form.

This generation also has a new platform for the re-appropriation of this universe: TikTok, which is now much more than a reservoir for choreographed dance videos. During the first lockdown, hashtags about Harry Potter flooded the network. In critical videos, many young women subtly address some of the feminist issues of their generation. For example, they analyze the internalized misogyny of characters such as Fleur Delacour or Lavender Brown, who are ridiculed by the author for displaying characteristics considered feminine, not afraid to show their emotions, unlike characters with more masculine characteristics such as Ginny and Hermione, who on the contrary, are valued.

They make a series of one-minute videos about the implications of the capitalist system of the magical world, about characters coded as non-heterosexual such as Lupin and Tonks, or about the place of racialization in the unfortunate Nazi metaphor expressed through Voldemort and his Death Eaters. One of the most popular trends is that of parodying stereotypical representations of racialized characters with videos that address the premise "If J.K. Rowling had written a Muslim/Latino/etc. character."

Closer to the world of fanfiction are videos that, using certain conventions of the saga, aim to expand it, and even intrude on it. This second type of video requires a greater mastery of filmic language and software, as some of the creators interviewed in a recent New York Times article explained.

These young fans have fun inserting themselves into the fiction through clever editing. By reusing footage from the Harry Potter films, people from minority groups place their stories at the center of the official saga, when they had little or no representation in the first place. These trends allow for the inclusion of racialized characters or lesbian romances not present in the original saga.

Encouraging a critical reading

These critical videos and neo-fictions of the Harry Potter saga are certainly the expression of a desire for "rectification" that is directed towards the author and her vision of a feminism restricted to the concerns of white women.

Nevertheless, this criticism remains the product of fans of the saga who are not seeking to censor the work, but to change the consumption habits of the fan community.

This renewal of interest by tiktok users shows that young feminists do not encourage pillorying or outright condemnation, but recognize the spirit of subversion that a work carries - in this case the message of tolerance and acceptance of difference, at the heart of the saga - while pointing out its flaws and those of the author.

The practices of fanfiction, whether written or audiovisual, demonstrate that fans want the saga to continue. The real question is whether the author will ever be willing to set her characters free and honor her own message by letting others join the adventure.

Anaïs Ornelas Ramirez is a doctoral student at CRIMIC and a professor at the UFR of Iberian and Latin American Studies at Sorbonne University. Her work focuses on feminist film criticism, cultural studies, television and decolonial feminism in the Americas.

This article has been republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article (in French.)