The Stigma of Being Harry Potter
于Fear within Melting BoundariesSearch for other papers by Jodie S. Brown in
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My chapter interrogates J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter novels through the lens of disability and body studies, specifically utilizing Irving Goffman’s theory of stigma. Harry’s story is a bildungsroman, a story of the young man trying to find his niche, the place where he belongs within his cultural community. Harry is marked literally and figuratively as both eccentric and undesirable, not belonging to the dominant cultural group either at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry or in his adoptive home with the Dursleys. I also draw on David T. Mitchell’s and Sharon Snyder’s concept of narrative prosthesis, a focus on disability that serves as a narrative trope to propel the story, to examine how Harry’s stigmatisation develops in the novels. Interrogating the series using the lens of disability studies allows readers to see the fear mechanisms involved in creating societal hierarchies based on arbitrary significations. I use both Goffman’s premise of stigma and Mitchell’s and Snyder’s model of narrative prosthesis to analyse Harry’s struggles with cultural negotiations in both of his homes, the Muggle and wizard worlds, and in the process examine how culture creates fear through the stigmatisation phenomenon.