Stereotypical and Multilayered Representations of Masculinity and Femininity in the Harry Potter Series: A Corpus-assisted Content Analysis
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.37134/ajelp.vol10.2.1.2022Keywords:
content analysis, frequency, gender representation, Harry Potter, stereotypesAbstract
Gender can be defined as the social and cultural production and reproduction of female and male identities and behaviours, separate from the biological differences between men and women (Flanagan, 2010). The aim of this paper is to probe the question of gender representation in J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series using a corpus-assisted approach to content analysis. To fulfil this aim, two research questions were tackled: 1) To what extent is J. K. Rowling balanced/imbalanced in selecting male and female characters and in distributing the major and minor roles between them? and 2) To what extent does J. K. Rowling use stereotypes and/or more complex ways of constructing gender in depicting the male and female characters in the Harry Potter series? Content analysis is a systematic way of looking at texts for their content, i.e., what the text is broadly ‘about’, who the characters are, the plot, and ‘‘what happens in the end’’ (Sunderland, 2010). It involves identifying particular content-related categories, and then counting occurrences of those categories, such as, for the purposes of this paper, the different types of protagonists, whether they are male and female and their various social and occupational roles. In this paper, the corpus-assisted content analysis of the Harry Potter series consists of the following procedures: the speech contribution of each character was manually extracted in order to compare the narrative space dedicated to male and female characters; the corpus tool WordSmith 5 (Scott 1999) was used to extract frequency lists for each book in the series; gender-indicative words were then selected from the top 200 most frequent words in each book; names of male and female characters were counted in order to measure the (im)balanced distribution of roles between males and females in each book; and finally, the books were also investigated manually to probe their construal of gender in a more qualitative way. The quantitative and qualitative analyses support the argument that Rowling’s representation of males/females is indeed imbalanced although her gender construction of the main characters is complex and multi-layered.
Downloads
References
Athenstaedt, U. (2003). ‘‘On the content and structure of the gender role self-concept: including gender-stereotypical behaviors in addition to traits’’. Psychology of Women Quarterly 27, 309–318. 10.1111/1471-6402.00111
Baker, P. (2010). ‘‘Will Ms ever be as frequent as Mr? A corpus-based comparison of gendered terms across four diachronic corpora of British English’’. Gender and Language 4(1): 125–149.
Baker, P. (2014). Using Corpora to Analyze Gender. London: Bloomsbury.
Blake, A. (2002). The Irresistible Rise of Harry Potter. London: Verso.
Blum, L. (2004). ‘‘Stereotypes and Stereotyping: A Moral Analysis’’. Philosophical Papers 33 (3): 251-289.
Brown, J. and St. Claire, N. (2002). Declarations of independence: Empowered girls in young adult literature. Lanham, Maryland: Scarecrow Press Inc.
Caldas-Coulthard, C. and Moon, R. (2010). ‘‘Curvy, hunky, kinky’: Using corpora as tools for critical analysis’’. Discourse & Society 21(2): 99–133.
Caldas-Coulthard, C. and Moon, R. (2016). ‘‘Grandmother, gran, gangsta granny: Semiotic representations of grandmotherhood’’. Gender and Language 10(3): 309–339
Cherland, M. (2008). ‘‘Harry’s Girls: Harry Potter and the Discourse of Gender’’. Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy 53(4): 273-282.
Choi, N. and Fuqua D. R. (2003). ‘‘The structure of the Bem sex role inventory: a summary report of 23 validation studies’’. Educational and Psychological Measurement 63, 872–887. 10.1177/0013164403258235
Croft, A., Schmader T., Block K., and Baron A. S. (2014). ‘‘The second shift reflected in the second generation: Do parents’ gender roles at home predict children’s aspirations?’’ Psychology Science:25, 1–11. 10.1177/0956797614533968.
Diekman A. B. and Eagly A. H. (2000). ‘‘Stereotypes as dynamic constructs: women and men of the past, present, and future’’. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 26, 1171–1188. 10.1177/0146167200262001.Dresang, E. (2002). ‘‘Hermione Granger and the heritage of gender’’. In: Whited, L (ed.) The Ivory Tower and Harry Potter: Perspectives on a Literary Phenomenon, pp.211–242. Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press.
Eberhardt, M. (2017). ‘‘Gendered representations through speech: The case of the Harry Potter series’’. Language and Literature, 26(3): 227–246. https://doi.org/10.1177/0963947017701851
Eccleshare, J. (2002). A Guide to the Harry Potter Novels. London: Continuum.
Epstein, D. (1998). “Real boys don’t work: ‘underachievement’, masculinity, and the
harassment of ‘sissies’”. In D. Epstein et al. (Eds.), Failing Boys? Issues in Gender and
Achievement. Buckingham: Open University Press.
Felski, R. (1989). Beyond feminist aesthetics: Feminist literature and social change. Harvard University Press.
Flanagan, V. (2010). ‘‘Gender Studies’’, in David Rudd (ed.) The Routledge Companion to Children’s Literature, pp. 26-38. London and New York: Routledge.
Gallardo, C. X. and Smith C. J. (2003). ‘‘Cinderfella: J.K. Rowling’s wily web of gender’’. In Anatol, G. L. (ed.) Reading Harry Potter: Critical Essays, pp.191-206. Connecticut: Praeger.
Gidengil, E. and Everitt, J. (2003). ‘‘Talking tough: Gender and reported speech in campaign news coverage’’. Political Communication 20(3): 209–232.
Heilman, E. E. (2003). ‘‘Blue Wizards and Pink Witches: Representations of Gender Identity and Power’’. In Heilman, E. E. (ed.). Critical Perspectives on Harry Potter (1st edition) , pp. 221–239. New York/London: Routledge.
Heilman, E. E. and Donaldson, T. (2009). ‘‘From Sexist to (sort-of) Feminist: Representations of Gender in the Harry Potter Series’’. In Heilman, E. Critical perspectives on Harry Potter (2nd ed) , pp. 139-162. New York: Routledge.
Hourihan, M. (1997). Deconstructing the Hero: Literary theory and children’s literature. Routledge: London and New York.
Hunt, S. (2015). ‘‘Representations of Gender and Agency in the Harry Potter Series’’. In: Baker, P., McEnery, T. (eds) Corpora and Discourse Studies. Palgrave Advances in Language and Linguistics. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137431738_13
Jackson, S. (2001). ‘‘Happily never after: Young women’s stories of abuse in heterosexual love relationships’’. Feminism and Psychology, 11 (3): 305–21.
Kachel, S., Steffens, M. C., and Niedlich, C. (2016). ‘‘Traditional Masculinity and Femininity: Validation of a New Scale Assessing Gender Roles’’. Frontiers in psychology, 7, 956. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00956.
Levorato, A. (2003). Language and Gender in the Fairy Tale Tradition. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Lippa R. A. (2005). ‘‘Sexual orientation and personality’’. Annual Review of Sex Research16, 119–153. 10.1080/10532528.2005.10559831
Mayes-Elma, R. (2006). Females and Harry Potter: Not all that empowering. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
Moon, R. (2014). ‘‘From gorgeous to grumpy: Adjectives, age, and gender’’. Gender and Language, 8(1): 5–41.
Motschenbacher, H. (2013). ‘‘Gentlemen before ladies? A corpus-based study of conjunct order in personal binomials’’. Journal of English Linguistics 41(3): 212–242.
Motschenbacher, H. and Stegu, M. (2013). ‘‘Queer linguistic approaches to discourse’’. Discourse & Society 24(5): 519–535.
Mikulan, K. (2009). ‘‘Harry Potter through the focus of feminist literary theory: Examples of (un)founded criticism’’. The Journal of International Social Research 2(9): 288–298.
Nakamura, M. (2006). ‘‘Creating indexicality: Schoolgirl speech in Meiji Japan’’. In: Cameron, D. and Kulick, D. (eds) The Language and Sexuality Reader, pp.270–284. New York, NY: Routledge.
Niedlich C., Steffens M. C., Krause J., Settke E., and Ebert I. D. (2015). ‘‘Ironic effects of sexual minority group membership: Are lesbians less susceptible to invoking negative female stereotypes than heterosexual women?’’ Archives of sexual behavior 44(5), 1439–1447. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-014-0412-1 Page, R. (2003). ‘‘Cherie: lawyer, wife, mum’: Contradictory patterns of representation in media reports of Cherie Booth/Blair’’. Discourse & Society 14(5): 559–579.
Pearce, M. (2008). ‘‘Investigating the collocational behavior of MAN and WOMAN in the BNC using Sketch Engine’’. Corpora 3(1): 1–29.
Pugh, T. and Wallace, D. (2006). ‘‘Heteronormative Heroism and Queering the School Story in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series’’. Children’s Literature Association 31(3): 260-281.
Rowling, J. K. (1997). Harry Potter the Philosopher’s Stone. London: Bloomsbury.
Rowling, J. K. (1998). Harry Potter the Chamber of Secrets. London: Bloomsbury.
Rowling, J. K. (1999). Harry Potter the Prisoner of Azkaban. London: Bloomsbury.
Rowling, J. K. (2000). Harry Potter the Goblet of Fire. London: Bloomsbury.
Rowling, J. K. (2003). Harry Potter the Order of the Phoenix. London: Bloomsbury.
Rowling, J. K. (2005). Harry Potter the Half-Blood Prince. London: Bloomsbury.
Rowling, J. K. (2007). Harry Potter the Deathly Hallows. London: Bloomsbury.
Sammons, Heather. “Harry Potter and the Portrayal of Women” Academia. n.p., n.d. Web. 10 Jun. 2013.
Schoefer, C. (2000). ‘‘Harry Potter’s Girl Trouble: The world of everyone's favorite kid wizard is a place where boys come first’’. https://edition.cnn.com/2000/books/news/01/13/Harry.potter.salon/index.html.
Scott, M. (1999). WordSmith Tools Help Manual, Version 3.0. Oxford: Mike Scott/Oxford University Press.
Spence J. T. and Buckner C. E. (2000). ‘‘Instrumental and expressive traits, trait stereotypes, and sexist attitudes’’. Psychology of Women Quarterly 24, 44-62. 10.1111/j.1471-6402.2000.tb01021.x
Sunderland, J. (2010). Language, Gender and Children’s Fiction. London, Continuum.
Wannamaker, A. (2006). ‘‘Men in Cloaks and High-heeled Boots, Men Wielding Pink Umbrellas: Witchy Masculinities in the Harry Potter Novels’’. The Looking Glass: New Perspectives on Children’s Literature 10(1). http://tlg.ninthwonder.com/rabbit/v10i1/alice4.html.
Wharton, S. (2005). ‘‘Invisible females, incapable males: Gender construction in a children’s reading scheme’’. Language and Education, 19 (3): 238–51.
Wilde A., and Diekman A. B. (2005). ‘‘Cross-cultural similarities and differences in dynamic stereotypes: A comparison between Germany and the United States’’. Psychology of Women Quarterly 29, 188–196. 10.1111/j.1471-6402.2005.00181.x
Wood, J. (2005). Gendered Lives: Communication, gender, & culture. Belmont, California. Thompson Learning.
Zettel, S. (2005). ‘‘Hermione Granger and the charge of sexism’’. In Lackey and Wilson (Eds.), Mapping the World of the Sorcerer’s Apprentice, pp. 83-100. Dallas, Texas: Benbella Books, Inc..
Zimman, L., Davis, J. and Raclaw, J. (eds). (2014). Queer Excursions: Retheorizing Binaries in Language, Gender, and Sexuality. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Zipes, J. (2006). Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion: The Classical Genre for Children and the Process of Civilization. New York, NY: Routledge.
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2022 Wesam Mohamed Abdelkhalek Ibrahim
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
