Females and Harry Potter: Not All that Empowering (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Females and Harry Potter: Not All that Empowering Johanna Denzin Bradley (bio) Females and Harry Potter: Not All that Empowering. By Ruthann Mayes-Elma. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2006. Unfortunately, the very title of Ruthann Mayes-Elma's book, Females and Harry Potter: Not All that Empowering, is misleading. Mayes-Elma examines only the female characters in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (1997), despite publishing her book in 2006 when the subsequent five volumes in the series were already in print. Thus, it is a bit disingenuous for Mayes-Elma to call her book, Females and Harry Potter, which leads one to expect a discussion of the entire corpus of the Harry Potter material. To be fair to Mayes-Elma, while the title of her book is misleading, she does state very clearly in her introduction that she is only planning on examining the role of females in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, and that she wishes that time had allowed an investigation of the other volumes. However, while an attempt to understand how females character are depicted and function within the Harry Potter world is a very worthwhile project, to attempt to answer those questions with only an analysis of the first book is an endeavor flawed at a very basic level. The usefulness of such a limited project would better warrant a journal article, not a full book, and should be undertaken after the other books in the series were released. Harry Potter was always intended as a seven-volume series, and the Harry Potter books need to be viewed as an organic unity, particularly if one is interested in tracing character development. Mayes-Elma, however, is not interested in simply looking at how J. K. Rowling has constructed gender, but she is specifically concerned about the agency of the female characters. As an extension of this interest, she also hopes that a deconstruction of gender (in Harry Potter, in particular) can help foster school curricula that are centered on social justice. Mayes-Elma underpins her study of Harry Potter on three theoretical strands: critical theory, ideas of critical literacy, and feminist literary criticism. She begins her study by briefly reviewing the explosion of the Harry Potter phenomena and discussing the history of children's literature and the intersection of children's literature, popular culture, and education. Chapter 2 then reviews the history and evolution of critical theory, feminist literary criticism, and critical literacy. Mayes-Elma stresses the need to deconstruct the multiple meanings in a text and the importance of being aware of the interplay of race, class, sexuality, and gender issues in society. And while critical theory and critical literacy both discuss the role of gender, Mayes-Elma argues that only feminist literary criticism fully explores all of the ramifications of gender, society, and power. It is the intersection of these three areas of thought (critical theory, ideas of critical literacy, and feminist literary criticism) that Mayes-Elma uses to construct her own theoretical framework with which to analyze the female characters in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. Mayes-Elma utilizes the idea of "agency," which she defines as "the active participation [End Page 189] in constructing an identity and resisting oppression" (49). She then creates a "two-by-two matrix," with dimensions of agency (identity and attitude) and the strategies used to achieve agency (attitude and voice). Attitude is defined as the thoughts and ideas helping to inform the actions one take, and voice is considered one's spoken and written word as well as one's appearance (56–64). Moving into her third chapter, Mayes-Elma explains her method of analysis and personally situates herself as a reviewer and researcher. Mayes-Elma draws on postmodern content analysis and discourse analysis to analyze each scene in the novel. She defines a scene as a sequence of events that are related to each other—a scene can be short or as long or even longer than an individual chapter. Using this definition, Mayes-Elma identifies thirty scenes in the entire book. Finally, in the fourth chapter, Mayes-Elma begins her actual analysis of the Sorcerer's Stone...