###Is that you, Harry Potter?

YESsssssssssss, I love love love Harry Potter, and lets be honest here, it is a little sad to have to dive in and disect some issues that are in the text. In a way, you don’t want to ruin something that is actually good.

So the question is, can the words used in Harry Potter actually affect young children? And the answer is yeah, it actually could. In “Representations of Gender and Agency in the Harry Potter Series.”, Hunt looks into gender inequality through textual analysis. Through this, she was able to notice an imbalance in the use of words that represent each text. As one would expect, words refering to boys occured more frequently than words refering to girls. That is just a common trend in history, overall.

With a generation existing practically raised around these books, imagine the influence that this could have. Children wanted to be the characters in the books. Let’s be honest, they want to be them so bad, who’s to say they wont adapt their sexist ways as well?

This makes me interested in rereading some of them myself to see if I see the imbalances. I will not lie, I do not remember them, but I was probably just focusing on the bigger storyline rather than anything that specific.

Sources

Hunt, Sally. 2015. “Representations of Gender and Agency in the Harry Potter Series.” In Corpora and Discourse Studies, edited by Paul Baker and Tony McEnery, 266–84. Palgrave Advances in Language and Linguistics. Palgrave Macmillan UK. http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1057/9781137431738_13.