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Harry Potter and the Prisoner of White Supremacist Aesthetics: Why do fans recreate characters of popular texts such as the Harry Potter series as different races to their canon race?
This essay explores the fan practice of 'racebending' - taking characters of one race and changing them to another withing their fan works - within the Harry Potter fandom on Tumblr, and was adapted into an article for ENI. This was written for the theory module Fans, Subcultures, and Cult Media; assessment one of this module was to write a series of blog posts discussing various topics from an authoethnographic standpoint, which can be accessed from the right button below. Module grade: 71%. Essay excerpt below:
In an ideal world, fans get what they want, when they want. I say this as a fan, and as someone who believes institutions like Hollywood need to further improve their diversity. But in the case of the Harry Potter fandom, to an extent they did get ‘what they wanted’; in the play Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, Hermione (who is now a
middle-aged woman, married to Ron with two children) is played by Noma Dumezweni, a black award-winning actress. Her daughter, Rose, is played by Cherrelle Skeete, also black (their son Hugo doesn’t appear in the play).
The role that fan productivity had in getting a black actress cast is unknown, but while some fans are celebrating, others are booing. Dumezweni was cast by the play’s director, and Rowling has responded negatively to the trolls, calling them “a bunch of racists” and saying “Hermione's race was never specified and that Dumezweni was the best applicant for the job;”7 “Hermione can be a black woman with my absolute blessing and enthusiasm.”8 This is a prime example of hook’s belief that those who go against “white supremacist aesthetics” face severe backlash
(hook, 1996; 73), and we as fans and as media studiers and practitioners can only hope that producers-to-be aren’t easily swayed by potential confrontations. After all, fans only poach because the original text is lacking (Jenkins, 1992; 23).
In what ways does slash fiction represent gay romance, and how does this impact gay people in real life?
This essay outlines the fan practice of fanfiction and 'shipping', focusing on the popular 'ship' Drarry, which comprises of the characters Harry Potter and Draco Malfoy from the Harry Potter franchise. It was written as the second assignment for the Digital Cultures theory module; assignment one was to write a series of short essay justifications, and can be found in the same document as the essay. Module grade: 71%. Essay excerpt below:
Representation is important in any medium, however problems can arise when that representation is doing more harm than good, which some would argue is what fanfic does. On the one hand, it works towards normalizing mlm relationships, influencing society as a generation of internet users becomes used to seeing prominent LGBT+ characters, encouraging them to question texts that don’t have this representation as not being an accurate reflection of our diverse society.
On the other hand however, as one Tumblr user called centrumlumina found in her unofficial 2013 AO3 census, the average fanfic participant is a white heterosexual female aged 25 years old, which lines up with similar surveys by destinationtoast on Tumblr (2013) and FFN Research (2011). The fact that this is the main demographic of fanfic consumers suggests that it is less about representing minority groups in order to normalize them as discussed above, and more about the readers and writers deriving pleasure from these specific pairings. As the average fic is about a m/m pairing, this raises questions about why straight women find stories about gay men more interesting than stories about heterosexual relationships or even lesbian relationships (which is discussed in many existing psychoanalytical articles on the topic), but is also causing concern for some mlm men as they are worried their relationships are becoming fetishised.
Beyoncé’s visual album Lemonade as a feminist critique of the representation of Black people in the news
An essay discussing how and why Beyoncé references the Black Lives Matter and Civil Rights Movement
in her 2016 visual album Lemonade.Grade: 72%. Excerpt below:
One of the ways in which Beyoncé critiques the representation of black people in the news is her overt ‘pro-blackness’ throughout Lemonade. This is not to say that the news is anti-black – according to Ian Law (2002; 49), “about ¾ of [news] items can be identified as broadly presenting an anti-racist message.” Beyoncé goes out of her way to say ‘black women are equal to white women; women are equal to men’ in her videos, making her a double-edged sword when it comes to equality. The American late-night variety TV show Saturday Night Live illustrated this in the sketch ‘The Day Beyoncé Turned Black’ (see appendix 2), in which at one point two business men are hiding under a table after the ‘white apocalypse’ caused by the release of Beyoncé’s Formation video. They’re discussing, in terror, how Beyoncé and other female celebrities, namely Kerry Washington, “may also be black.” One of the men cries, “how can they be black? They’re women!” to which the other replies, “I think they might be both!” causing them to scream “nooo!”
A discourse study on newspaper coverage of politicians
This essay looks at how different newspapers discuss the politicians and political parties that they support and oppose by doing a textual analysis of the discourse and lexis used in four articles from two similar UK newspapers (The Telegraph and The Guardian). Grade: 73%. Excerpt below:
Most newspapers have an agenda when it comes to politics, either leaning towards the left or right of the spectrum. This means the way two similar newspapers talk about the same topic or person may be completely oppositional. This can clearly be seen in the daily broadsheets The Telegraph, a Conservative newspaper, and The Guardian, which supports Labour, in articles that discuss the British Prime Minister David Cameron and the new Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn. Both newspapers use similar language when talking about the person or party they oppose – undermining their campaigns, leadership style, eligibility, and party – and the one they support – using language to ‘talk up’ the person and their party and policies. This is interesting to see as this seems to suggest a more ‘circular’ or ‘horseshoe-shaped’ political spectrum rather than a line with ‘left’ and ‘right’ being binary opposites; while the beliefs of the political parties and the views of their respective media outlets may be so, the methods of how they discuss what they are for and against is incredibly similar to each other.