Amy Hamm: Woke academics claim J.K. Rowling guilty of being Voldemort

British writer J.K Rowling poses on the red carpet after arriving to attend the World Premiere of the film Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore in London on March 29, 2022. Photo by Tolga Akmen /Getty Images

Article content

Two Australian academics working in “celebrity studies” published an article this month that refers to J.K. Rowling’s fame in the past tense and argues that Rowling has morphed into the evil fictional supervillain of her own series.

Article content

Rowling “was a global prestigious celebrity,” they wrote, but is now, on account of her tireless work to uphold the rights of girls and women, a “monarch dethroned,” and a “haughty TERF ‘champion.’” (TERF stands for “trans exclusionary radical feminist” and is a slur used to denounce those who dare question gender ideology.) The article, from academic journal “Celebrity Studies,” is titled “J.K. Rowling ‘embodies the divisive and bigoted evil she once created a boy wizard to defeat’: investigating celebrified transphobia using field analysis and audience research.”

Article content

Article content

Article content

“Celebrified transphobia,” according to authors Sarah Scales and Joanna McIntyre, happens when “cis celebrities entering public discourse about trans people use their elevated social platform to espouse transphobia. We identity this ‘evil twin’ of trans celebrity activism as celebrified transphobia, a relatively new, mediated and worryingly emblazoned form of transphobia.”

Article content

Article content

Stripped of academic-speak, what the authors are saying is that when famous people speak, a lot of people listen. Which is fine, they argue, so long as the celebrities parrot the orthodox ideas that the authors believe in. A failure to do so, they say, amounts to evildoing. The article’s title uses a quote from a survey respondent who compared Rowling to the wicked nemesis that Harry Potter must defeat.

Article content

If you’ve read the Harry Potter books then you’re familiar with Voldemort, the primary and most malevolent antagonist of J.K. Rowling’s wizarding universe. Voldemort is so evil that many of the series characters — adults and children alike — shrink or shriek in horror at the mere mention or thought of his name, hence Voldemort’s “he who must not be named” moniker.

Article content

Article content

If I could suggest a similar moniker for Rowling, it is this: She Who Requires No Introduction. A 2003 Ipsos-Reid poll showed that 44 per cent of Canadian households owned at least one book in the series. A 2018 estimate suggested that 1 in 15 persons on this planet have read one of her Harry Potter books. Hardly a week passes that Rowling isn’t trending on social media for her latest work or commentary.

Article content

There is nothing past tense about Rowling’s fame. If we were to believe the authors of the article in “Celebrity Studies,” we might think that Rowling is only mentioned when being pilloried. That is false. They write that Rowling’s “unique celebrity journey detoured sharply when she used digital media culture to come down from her ‘ivory tower’ and resettle in the field of gender politics,” and that “her celebrified transphobia had negatively impacted the overwhelming majority of current and former fans.”

Article content

And yet HBO, with Rowling as executive producer, is premiering a remake of the Harry Potter series this coming December. Rowling’s celebrity, and career, are doing just fine.