Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Females and Harry Potter: Not All That Empowering

Females and Harry Potter: Not All That Empowering

Mayes-Elma, Ruthann

Paperback

Series: Reverberations: Contemporary Curriculum and Pedagogy

Literary Criticism

ISBN10: 074253779X
ISBN13: 9780742537798
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: Aug 2 2006
Pages: 164
Weight: 0.59
Height: 0.49 Width: 6.06 Depth: 9.06
Language: English
Females and Harry Potter is a deconstruction of the representations of women's agency in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. Using critical discourse analysis and focusing on five themes (rule following and breaking, intelligence, validating and enabling, mothering, and resistance), Mayes-Elma explores the construction of traditional gender roles in the book. Additionally, the author locates the foundations of feminist epistemology-binary oppositions, gender boundaries, and woman as 'other'-that is deeply embedded within the book's themes. Traditional gender constructions of both men and women are found throughout the Sorcerer's Stone. Ultimately, the book explores the sexism inherent in the Harry Potter series: a hero and his male friends are the focus and center of activity and the female characters are enablers-at best. Passive and invisible female characters exist only as bodies, 'bound' by traditional gender conventions; they resist evil, but never gender stereotypes. Mayes-Elma concludes with a discussion of the implications for development of school curricula that enable students to critically deconstruct these texts.

1 different editions

Also available

Also in

Literary Criticism

View All