Transformative Readings: Harry Potter Fan Fiction, Trans/Queer Reader Response, and J. K. Rowling
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The politics of children's literature and the actors surrounding it have never been more visible than they are now, in the digital age. As one of the first children's series to gain widespread popularity concurrently with the spread of the internet, the Harry Potter septet arrived on the global stage at the perfect moment to develop an avid, connected fandom. But the fandom has laid bare the many conflicting ideologies of the fans themselves and of the actors surrounding the texts. This article examines the contentious issue of gender nonnormativity and its relation to the Harry Potter texts, the queer/trans reading practices and political resistance common to the fandom, and the ongoing disagreements over gender, made visible on social media, between Rowling and the fans of her series. The article discusses the Harry Potter novels' varied and conflicting ideologies; queer/trans readings of the Potter septet, including both invitations and resistances to queer/trans reading by Rowling herself; how gender is queered and queried in and through fan fiction; and finally, the recent hostilities between Rowling and her fans. It concludes by discussing the worsening relationship between Rowling and her fans and highlighting how fans are using their collective power to undermine Rowling's gender politics through fan fiction. By doing so, the article traces the complex politics of the reception of books for young people in the digital age, demonstrating that authors' powerful voices continue to shape readers' responses to texts long after their publication but showing, too, that readers often resist authors' attempts to influence not only their textual interpretations but their politics.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.017 | 0.016 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".