Harry Potter and the Social Construct. Does Gender-Swap Fanfiction Show Us That We Need to Re-consider Gender Within Children’s Literature?

Abstract

In this paper I look at how gender is performed in fanfiction, specifically in gender-swap stories within the Harry Potter fandom. Fanfiction is not constrained by any editorial oversight, and there are no financial considerations attached to either reading or writing it, two facts which make it a unique and essential part of the discourse surrounding children’s literature. Anyone can write and read it, and there are very few narrative constraints, both of which make the characters and the worlds open to almost infinite types of adaptation. Rather than being closed off within a printed text, the characters take on an elasticity which allows them to exist in worlds, relationships and stories outside their source material. This narrative freedom means fan fictions act not just as textual adaptations, but also social commentaries, narrative sites which are plastic enough to allow writers to project themselves and their opinions onto pre-existing and familiar characters. This elasticity and textual fluidity lends itself very well to a study of contemporary performances of gender, which in turn reveals how the offline publishing market’s adherence to a patriarchal hegemony continues to produce a gender imbalance in terms of both subject and author privilege, something which doesn’t adequately reflect either the desires or the reading habits of contemporary children and young adults.