Feminist Reading
of Harmione and other female characters in Harry Potter. How do the character -
portrayal of Harmione and other female characters support feminist discourse?
First define the
word.
Feminism is a range of political movements,
ideologies and social movements that share a common goal: to define, establish,
and achieve equal political, economic, cultural, personal, and social rights
for women. This includes seeking to establish equal opportunities for women in
education and employment. A feminist advocates or supports the rights and
equality of women.
Character of Harmione :
=She is intelligent more than others.
=Ron says that they can't survive without Harmione.
=When Harry says that I saw my parents at that time also Hermione says that
it's not possible and gives logical arguments.
=Things given by Dombuledore,Why he give book to her so there are two points 1)
generally practical things given to boys. 2) she is intelligent and able to
read it.
= We can see that in class when any professor asks something at that time her
hand is always raised while others not.
= Generally the idea is that women are sensitive or men are worrier but here we
can say that Hermione is more worrier not sensitive compared to Harry.
=In some pieces of pop culture, males are represented as braver, wiser and more
powerful than the women. Among many movies and books, this can primarily be
seen in the Spiderman trilogy, where Spiderman’s enemies capture his girlfriends
to force Spiderman to fight, and in every movie the male is always the one who
has to defeat evil to save the female. However, Harry Potter is different in
the sense that you can find a ton of important women in the series, as well as
men, and there is no difference in the genders.
=Fry argues that Hermione can be seen as another main character in the series,
and this is an interesting point that she brings up. Many strong female
characters appear throughout the series, and they play many differing parts,
including a friend, mother, sister, student, etc.
=The psychologist Gail Grynbaum states “Hermione is repeatedly the
truth-sleuth, comfortable in the library, who finds the clue that makes sense
of the mystery at hand. She is always the one standing at a crossroads pointing
the way.” The fact that Hermione is there at the fork in the road showing the
right way to go breaks the gender stereotype of women. Grynbaum points out the
fact that Hermione is that character that is smart, and she is able to figure
out most of the secrets that no one else can. Her knowledge and brains save her
and her friends throughout the series multiple times, showing her strength
every time she uses her intellect to defeat a problem.
So after all we can say that Hermione has beauty
with brain.
Other points
=Harry's mother Lily is also intelligent rather than his father.
=If we can say about evil characters like Voldemore who is in the power not
other witches.
=Male rules over language that's why difference between "wizard"
"witch".
The series may be titled for the boy who lived, but
he never could’ve accomplished everything without the girl who was the
cleverest witch of her age, or without the sacrifice of his selfless mother.
But problem is that why the writer not put Hermione as a main
character.
=Idea that women have to be giver why not man? It symbolise through purse which
is Hermione's.
=why only man on power position like Harry, Voldermert, etc.
=Why some intellectual arguments done between only Harry and Dombuldor, why not
with Hermione?
=woman is an object it also we can see while Ron doubt on relations between
Harry and Hermione.
Strangers to Ourselves?
(Page No. 63, 64, 65)
Facing exile, Thomas Mowbray in Shakespeare’s Richard 2 complains that in a
foreign country his tongue will become like a musical instrument that has lost
its strings.
Julia Kristeva’s book Strangers to Ourselves is about foreignness. It begins
with a moving, poetic account of what it’s like to be an immigrant, cherishing
‘that language of the past that withers without ever leaving you’. You improve
your skills in the new language, but it’s never quite yours, and you lack the
authority that goes with unthinking fluency. You are easy to ignore, and thus
easily humiliated. Increasingly foreign to those you have left behind as well,
you become a kind of cultural orphan, never at one with anyone anywhere.
At the same time, immigrants may suddenly find the prohibitions they have grown
up with suspended as the power of the symbolic order is lifted. They become
‘liberated’, other than they are. But are they freer? Or just more solitary?
Why do we fear foreigners, people from other cultures, asylum seekers? Well,
for one thing, they demonstrate that there are alternative ways to be, that our
own ways are not inevitable, and therefore not necessarily ‘natural’.
Disparaging the others seems to make some people feel better. Besides, the
encounter with foreigners calls into question the ‘we’ that is so easily taken
for granted.
This badly needs to be called into question. Kristeva concludes, Psychoanalysis
indicates that we are all foreign to ourselves. In the first place, there is
something everyone has left behind:
A child confides in his analyst that the finest day in his life
is that of his birth: ‘Because that day it was me – I like being me,
I don’t like being an other’. Now he feels other when he
has poor grades – when he is bad, alien to the
parents’ and teachers desire. Likewise, the unnatural ‘foreign’ languages, such
as writing or mathematics,
arouse an uncanny in the child.
And in the second place we are all inhabited by a stranger, whose ways are
unknown to us and contest the values we (think we) take for granted:
The foreigner is within us.
And when we flee from or struggle against the foreigner
we are fighting our unconscious – that ‘improper’
facet of our impossible ‘own and proper’.
In this circumstances, one object of desire, especially familiar in a colonial
and postcolonial world, is identity itself. Many people especially those
subject to a history of imperial oppression, experience a longing to belong.
And who, in a globalized world, is not at the mercy of institutions,
corporations, a language defined or controlled elsewhere? Since the 19th
century, nationalism has offered to restore a true identity that has been all
but erased.
Jacques Derrida considers this issue in Monolingualism of the Other, first
published in French in 1996. His own special case is French Algria, where he
grew up as a Jewish child in the 1930s. Ironically, Arabic was taught in the
schools there as if it were a foreign languages. Hebrew, meanwhile, was not
taught at all. French was the young Derrida’s first language although this too
was the property of others: it belonged in the faraway country of France.
And yet, in a sense, Derrida argues, his own case was exemplary for all of us.
Culture is always ‘colonial’, in that it imposes itself by its power to name
the world and to instil rules of conduct. No one inhabits a culture by nature.
As a matter of definition, no culture comes naturally. We are all exiles.
Moreover, the culture we belong to is never beyond improvement, never quite
what it should be.
Don’t nationalists identify with the nation as it once was, or as it one day
might be? Isn’t perfect identity always the property of others?
At the same time, in the current world order we do well to remember that not
all exiles are politically equivalent. Some people are more exiled than others
...
Ideological State Apparatuses
by Louis Althusser
Those of us who were involved in teaching in the 1970s, when Louis Althusser’s
essay on the Ideological State Apparatuses (IASs) first appeared in
translation, were thrilled to learn that the education system was the main
ideological apparatus. This meant that as radicals, we had work to do on our
own doorstep, instead of looking slightly out of place on other people’s picket
lines. The argument was that schools and universities not only eject a
proportion of the young prepared to take up occupations at every level of the
economic structure but in the process of teaching reading, writing and
arithmetic they also provide instruction in obedience, deference, elementary
psychology (the character – types of the 19th – century novel, for instance),
the virtues of liberal democracy, how to give orders, and how to serve the
community. In short, educational institutions inculcate discipline, and the
self – discipline that encourages their pupils to go out into society and ‘work
by themselves’ to maintain the status quo.
