From chapter 3 of The Will to Change (join the book club!) while she's discussing how mass media reinforces partriarchal norms onto boys and young men
The British mind can only conjure imperialism and patriarchy
It's interesting she mentions the (understandable) fact that non-patriarchal books don't see the same exposure, because I'm having a really hard time thinking of children's/YA books that don't reinforce these tropes. If someone asked me for book recommendations for their young child I'd have trouble recommending any.
Oh crap you're right. I guess I don't associate them with children literature because I read them much later in life.
I’d say the Bartimaues Trilogy is a decent replacement to the latter Harry Potter books (3-7) if I recall correctly. The first 2 Harry Potter books are for a younger audience and are more childlike.
Nathaniel, one of the 3 POV characters of the series, is a chauvinistic asshole, but it is shown as such and the book frames him negatively as he develops these traits and goes down the dark path of becoming a government sorcerer fascist. He then redeems himself by abandoning all that baggage and conditioning and aiding the revolutionaries.
The other 2 POV characters are a revolutionary woman who is basically a straight up anti-mage communard, and a witty and sarcastic demonic entity that is actually just a tortured spirit that wants release. I seem to recall themes of equality and fighting oppression and unlearning prejudices and it was generally pretty judgmental of the oppressive world that sorcerers made and their wars, their entire system of magic is made out of summoning and enslaving spirits and they are tyrannical against non-magical ubermensch, and this entire thing is overthrown.
I’d say the Bartimaues Trilogy is a decent replacement to the latter Harry Potter books (3-7) if I recall correctly.
Hell yeah I never thought I'd see the Bartimaeus books being mentioned on Hexbear. Loved those books growing up and you're right, they were immediately one of the series I bounced to in between like Half-Blood Prince & Deathly Hallows. That trilogy, basically Garth Nix's entire bibliography at the time (what I would give to read Sabriel and Abhorsen again for the first time...s/o to Keys to the Kingdom too I remember those being decent), stuff like Kate Constable's Singer of All Songs series, and Tamora Pierce's Song of the Lioness & Circle of Magic series; all 58 of the Animorph books - shoutout The Solution and the other 2-3 David books; I would've trapped him as a rat too - based Rachel I will always remember the part where she went "yeah I'll stay with him to make sure he gets stuck in the rat morph, his tears won't affect me" and then she fuckin used that bald eagle morph to fly his rat ass to the desert and leave him there.
GOOD YOUNG ADULT FANTASY BOOKS - MY CHILDHOOD!!!! Shoutout to Firegold by Dia Calhoun too because that fucking book and the golden apple that plays a role in it have been stuck in my head since like 2005 because I was sitting in the library like 70 pages into it and going "oh...wait...this is a horse novel? i thought it was gonna be about wizards or something"
I read those books so many times as a kid, absolutely loved them.
there's also a cool fourth book set way thousands of years before the events of the trilogy when Bartimaeus was serving Solomon the Great btw
The Earthsea books by Ursula Le Guin are pretty good, though I only read the first one
They’re also pretty hard reads for kids though. No one does tell, don’t show like LeGuin… but definitely not a style you can consume as easily
No one does tell, don’t show like LeGuin
did you mean show, don't tell— or am I misunderstanding
Nope, which is what makes her writing so unique. Show don’t tell is the standard way of doing things, but LeGuinn often verges into tell for large chunks. Highly recommended reading The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas, if you want to see how crazy she can get with it!
I recently read Iron Widow which is YA scifi that has thick anti-patriarchal themes. It's pretty recent though.
the lib feminist mech furry polyamory book is not a replacement for harry potter. like were talking elementary school vs highschool. also just becuase it has a protaganisnt who spend a lot of time TALKING bout the patriarchy she still embodies the critiques bell hooks made. like the main character is the only smart capable women and all the others are mean, stupid, or cowards, and the only people on her side are her two male lovers. she singlehandedly changed the world through her force of her will and "spirit". also the author is anti communist fyi. (still gonna pirate that second book in hopes of a threesome) EDIT also the book is pure slop. just botton of the barrel fanfic quality slop that you read if you like polyamory and mechs and furrys not because its good. its actully a laughably bad book, like i literally laughed while reading it because of how absurd the "feminist" parts of the book were. like yeah babe being sexually abused is soooooooooooo girlboss when you are just too cool and bad ass to CARE that you are being sexually abused.
Get the lists of books being banned from middle school libraries.
Can always ask a librarian at a non crazy library. NYPL probably has some ideas.
Agreed except with the last paragraph part. Every child/person I know who likes Harry Potter has identified as a girl or woman. I've never met a guy who likes it at all. I think the patriarchal vision is therefore targeted primaraly at a girl audience. I don't have a coherent thought about this, so would like to hear other opinions on this.
The guys I know who like Harry Potter are all the types who are willing to embrace being a nerd as part of their personality. The more bro-ish guys always hated it, even if they eventually came around to other nerdy media like Star Wars or various other fantasy franchises.
yes for sure. i guess it is connected to gendered reading patterns in some way
tbh I think it has to do with the perception of British people among yanks, where for some reason they’re seen as posh, which is further implied to be effete or “gay”
The part about Harry being some super genius aryan ubermensch or whatever is also bogus. He was always portrayed as a dumb fuck who couldn't get anything but lucky and constantly failed upward. If anything it was an uncritical representation of the journey of most men in the ruling class as presented by an uncreative author with shitty politics.
true, although griffindor is definitely considered to be the aryan ubermensch house in the books. so he is both that and a dumb fuck - dialectics
If anything it was an uncritical representation of the journey of most men in the ruling class as presented by an uncreative author with shitty politics.
my cohort was in grade school while the films were coming out so it had pretty universal popularity, before/after the high water mark of releases and advertising blitzes could be a bit different though.
I remember a few masc fans of Harry Potter, but when I was on tumblr during 2012 in sci-fi/fantasy circles I felt like it was mostly women and the guys who voraciously consumed the books had moved on to other things.
yeah i feel like after the popularity wave there is a very gendered division in which media stays in the cultural psyche
I’m a cis man and as a child I liked the books. They were still new though but my experience was everybody my age engaging with them, boys included
to me it seems like there was a generational or cultural shift at some point. i guess part of it is that boys barely engage with books nowadays, if at all
it was totally promoted as a book that was finally getting boys into reading and was considered a boy book, i literally had other little girls say "ew that's a boy book" our teacher promoted it and Percy Jackson as boy books. i remember because I resented it. girls didnt get into it until i was in middle school. the book is for elementary school kids though. also i didnt like how shitty harry became in the fith book and i was told that was becuase thats how boys were and that the book was FOR boys. this was a different teacher.
very interesting. ive also mostly seen Percy Jackson talked about in girl spaces. i wonder if there is a generational or a cultural shift at some point
i mean what ages are we talking about? i think thats the thing. it was pushed on boys in elementary school and then the ones where are into fandom spaces were in middle and high school and those were mostly girls because boys aren't into fandom. what do you mean by "girl spaces" genuinely confused? also im under 25. so i don't think this is a generational thing. like most elementary schoolers are not on Tumblr or fan forums. is that what you mean by "girl spaces". where are these girls under ten years old hanging out?
sorry for the questions this convo is deeply deeply baffling to me. are you guys all talking about middle and highschoolers and adults. to be clear i read harry potter in middle school and being "into" it was not normal i got many of my books destroyed over it but there were some other nerd girls i found solace with. listen i did go to an extremely ghetto ass middle school so maybe my experiences are diffrent.
i don't know I'm just interested in different people's experiences with popular media. by girl spaces I do mean fandom but also middle/high school cliques.
ok well bell hooks is talking about children here, the harry potter books were made to mature as the books go on sure, but if you look at what bell hooks is saying and recall the discussion around boys falling behind in reading we are talking about younger children here. and yes it was pushed on younger boys. there was a whole media narrative about it.
You hate Harry Potter because of its white imperialist framework.
I hate Harry Power because it's mediocre dull escapism.
But really though, little-kid me tried with this series and it just sucks. At least capeshit promises fun costumes and varied powers and gimmicks.
I remember having harry potter crammed down my throat when it first came out and feeling like I was missing something because I just couldn’t get in to it. I guess I was a smart little dude.
The "occasional wizard of color" bit is funny because to be honest, I don't think you could fill both sides of single page of 8x11 printer paper with the text/character-to-character interactions between Harry Potter and Dean Thomas - the only black Gryffindor in his year - between books 1-6 until Harry decides Ginny is his OTP after dumping Cho Chang for no reason - and even then he barely interacts with Dean.
It's actually crazy that Kingsley Shacklebolt (
even I, as a young Harry Potter fan who was at each Barnes & Noble midnight release for books 4-7, knew that fucking name was racist I can't believe she fucking got away with it - Cho Chang is a similar vein ofc but damn I guess Cho should count her blessings that she wasn't named like Cho Nanking or something...) doesn't really appear as a speaking character until Book 5 but probably has more of a presence in the story than any of the 3 black Gryffindor wizards (and uh...the one black Slytherin Malfoy picked up in book 6....Blaze Zabini or whoever) and even then, his like most notable conversation with Harry is when they're doing the dumbass polyjuice potion assisted broom suicide for Hedwig in book 7.JK Rowling they should bury you alive in the Edinburgh catacombs behind hardcover copies of all of Susan Stryker's books!!!
Cho Chang
the funniest thing about the names from two cultures thing is that rowling could just say she's intentionally multiethnic but she doesn't care and she's not clever enough to come up with that.
It's been many years since I read Chamber of Secrets, but I don't recall the protagonists using violence against anyone except Wizard Hitler and his murder snake in that book.
Harry gains a slave elf in like the 5th book or something after he inherits Sirius' stuff
We were talking about Chamber of Secrets, but this doesn't really matter
Ad a kid who looked like book cover Harry potter when they were first getting big, so many adults thought I was trying to look like Harry potter and would tell me I do under the assumption I'd be stoked. I was not, I just had already looked like that and being under 10 years old didn't have too much agency over my appearance anyway. I had glasses cause I needed them and had a really normal haircut. I think I was mostly being contrarian but it also all seemed really childish to me even as a 10 year old. I was really good at reading and was reading the same grocery store crime mystery novels my mom read by then.
Yeah this quote is correct in it's general intent, but gets some of the details wrong. Harry in the books is not super smart, he's at best an average student.
He is still a genius in that he is a prodigy, exceptionally talented at wizardcraft and seeking.
I don't recall the protagonists using violence against anyone
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
We could say that tricking someone into ingesting enough drugs to instantly fall asleep is a form of violence
books that do not reinscribe patriarchal masculinity do not get the approval the harry potter books have receivedI wish the libs had internalized from the book that violence can be good and necessary.
They did but applied it to cops rather than anything positive
Man i didnt even know we would get to see rowling get skewered, over a decade before she was a widely known terf. I was still a young lad reading these books front to back on release day when she wrote this lol
Bell Hooks didn't have good arguments here. Despite libs thinking so, HP isn't theory. It's not a novel's purpose to have protagonists critique sexist and racist thinking. Sometimes, showing the bad guys thinking like that is enough of a critique. Also, the media blitz sounds a lot like a (kinda circular) conspiracy theory. Margaret Atwood's books receive a lot of approval. Does that make them sexist?
Bell Hooks didn't have good arguments here.. It's not a novel's purpose to have protagonists critique sexist and racist thinking
A character is literally called Cho Chang, JK Rowling is racist as fuck
Also, the media blitz sounds a lot like a (kinda circular) conspiracy theory. Margaret Atwood's books receive a lot of approval. Does that make them sexist?
You have causality the wrong way around - Atwood's books received a lot of positive media attention because they used sexist tropes, from memory (or conversely wouldn't have received media attention if it was actually radical)
A character is literally called Cho Chang, JK Rowling is racist as fuck
I won't argue with you, but that's not what's in the text by Bell Hooks
And the media thing without elaboration is still a weak ass argument.
And the media thing without elaboration is still a weak ass argument.
She elaborates more on her overall points about mass media in the rest of the chapter, I'd encourage you to read it!
Cho Chang
Kim Kitsuragi
