Introduction
Henry Jekins has discussed how fans reshaped the media content to
satisfy their own fantasies and how the corporate media tried to find the
balance between encouraging fan participation and protecting their
interests. Fandom can be one of the most frequently brought up topics.
The digital revolution has generated new kinds of cultural output (Pearson
84). In recent ten years, the book and film franchise of Harry Potter has
inspired a monumental fandom community with a veracious output of
either online or offline activities such as fan conventions, cosplay,
fanfiction, fan activism, and so on.
Thesis
Through the process of media convergence and development of
participatory culture, Harry Potter fandom has engaged many positive
political activisms in both online and offline world by both traditional and
new forms of media. The involvement of media in fan subculture has
allowed Harry Potter fandom to actively participate in fan activism and
then resulted in three significant impacts.
- Shaping of young identities through digital platforms to align with
positive ideologies of Harry Potter series through the creation of a
participatory culture.
- Accessibility of digital media allows fans to be more engaged in social
activism.
- Content creation by fans helps break the stereotyped heteronormative
gender roles.
Group Identities
The relative anonymity of Internet communication encourages self-expression and facilitates the
formation of relationships based on shared values and beliefs (Code & Zaparyniuk 1346). Thus,
for Harry Potter fans, their group identities will gradually be formed through the communication
with each other, which has promoted the participatory culture. The behavior of fans also reflects,
to some extent, the values of the people they admire. Here I will take Pottermore as an example.
Pottermore, is a website that allows the fans to be sorted in their own Hogwarts house. By
completing the test on Pottermore, fans are usually assigned to the house that best fits their
personality.
Slytherin: Ambitious. Ravenclaw: Intelligent. Gryffindor: Fearless. Hufflepuff: Honest.
Code and Zaparyniuk have proposed that the experience of an individual’s identity, as perceived
through thought and action, is influenced through the interplay of the individual and social others
(1349). Therefore, since fans can communicate their Pottermore identities online, they will
probably want to show the qualities of the house they belong to or the house of the character they
like belongs to. In that case, Harry Potter fans can become active agents in social change with
their justice by joining movements in areas related to their favorite characters, motivating fans to
follow the extraordinary wizards’ footsteps.
Engagement
Over the past ten years, Harry Potter fandom has participated in various activisms. There's the
Protego Foundation, which fights for animal rights. There's Transfiguring
Adoption, which provides resources to foster families. There's the
Hogwarts Running Club, which organizes events to raise money for various
charities (Yasharoff).
Just as Henry Jenkins has said, fandom helps fans shift their positions from
passive consumers to positive producers (35). Bennett has mentioned that
according to Earl and Kimport's study of online fan activism, highly organized e-mail and online
letter-writing campaigns, and online petitions in particular, were very much prevalent (1). Media
convergence allows fans to use differen social media to publicize their campaigns, reaching
extended networks to reach a larger audience.
The Protego Foundation
With the purpose of protecting animals, fans of Harry Potter spontaneously organize related
campaigns on various social media platforms. Hashtag can be a good example to show how
fans become more engaged in social movements. People read, retweet, and comment on others'
tweets or post their own content with the same hashtag to participate in such activism. In the case
of the hashtag #VeganButterbeer created by Protego Foundation, more than 7,000 Potterheads
support the idea that providing an animal-friendly vegan butter beer option at the Wizarding
World of Harry Potter parks inside Universal. Fans worldwide share related digital news articles
and images under the hashtag, making political participation behavior routine and highly
accessible. Thus, for the younger generation, fandom has become an essential channel for
obtaining political-related information. The younger generation's proficient use of social media
and the increasing prevalence of social media make them more engaged in political movements.
HPA (Harry Potter Alliance)
HPA has been organizing and training fans to become heroes for more than 15 years. Fans use
the power of story and popular culture to make activism accessible and sustainable (Fandom
Forward).
The HPA’s energy has spilled over into using electoral and other social
movement-adjacent tactics. In 2009, they organized to stop the passage
of Proposition One, an anti-marriage equality bill in Maine. In a single day,
HPA members knocked on nearly 700 doors, collected 30 absentee ballots,
and made 3,597 phone calls – breaking Mass Equality’s phone banking
record by 1,200% (Harry Potter Alliance, 2009). They saw similar results
during phone banking initiatives in 2011, when they made 6200 calls for
marriage equality in Rhode Island and again in 2012, in support of
marriage equality in Maine as well as the DREAM Act in Maryland – both of
which passed (Harry Potter Alliance, 2011, 2012). This example indicates
that besides online social media, fandom also promotes the engagement
of social movements offline in the real world.
Fan Creation
With the convergence of media, fanworks always potentially represent
fans’ political goals that they try to break the stereotyped
heteronormative gender roles. Fanfiction, in particular, is the most
remarkable way. According to Salmon and Symons, people enjoy reading
fictions because fiction unleashing their reactions to potential lives and realities, they feel
more richly and adaptively about what they have not actually experienced. In the case of Harry
Potter fanfictions, most of them tell male-male romance. As we can see on the fanfiction website,
there are around 52,000 fanworks about the Draco Malfoy and Harry Potter. People often claim
that the younger generation is oversaturated with sex, and fan fiction does not escape these
qualms. However, queer fan works impact queer readers’ experience with the Harry Potter books
by creating a highly personalized world in which they are free to express themselves in a fashion
that not only boosts their self-esteem as well as their representation in fan media, but also more
deeply connects them to the text (Mignogna). Thus, with this impact of queer fan works, Harry
Potter fandom has celebrated Pride month in 2019 by advocating for LGBTQIA+ equality
(Fandom Forward). Fans shared their favorite queer characters and stories on the social media as
way to bring awareness to the importance of these stories. They also submitted comments against
the Trump administration’s proposal to strip trans people’s access to non-discriminatory
healthcare, protesting the injustice of embassies around the world not being able to fly the rainbow
flag in honor of Pride Month. Therefore, fandom is able to disseminate the ideologies of gender
equality across the world.
Bird, J. and Maher, T.V. (2017), "Turning Fans Into Heroes: How the Harry
Potter Alliance Uses the Power of Story to Facilitate Fan Activism and Bloc
Recruitment", Earl, J. and Rohlinger, D.A. (Ed.) Social Movements and
Media (Studies in Media and Communications, Vol. 14), Emerald Publishing
Limited, Bingley, pp. 23-54. https://doi.org/10.1108/S2050-
206020170000014002
Andrew Slack, founder of the HPA, sees the world of Harry Potter as a deeply political one, where
questions of social justice, equality, and freedom are key. He claims that any real-world problem
can be "mapped onto it" in a process he calls "cultural acupuncture", channeling passion for the
text toward passion for social issues (Kligler-Vilenchik et.al). The links between the content world
and the real-world issues the HPA engages with are not limited to the rhetoric of the founder. HPA
members take on the metaphor, creating their own connections between the social issues they
engage with and characters, terms, and themes from the magical world. Over the past ten years,
Harry Potter fandom has participated in various activisms. There's the Protego
Foundation, which fights for animal rights. There's Transfiguring Adoption,
which provides resources to foster families. There's the Hogwarts Running
Club, which organizes events to raise money for various charities
(Yasharoff).
