'They are all trans and in love sorry I don't make the rules': a multimodal analysis of transgender identity construction in Harry Potter fanfiction

Transgender voices, bodies, and experiences are becoming increasingly visible in linguistic research, but they remain underrepresented. By contrast, fanfiction provides a means for marginalised groups, such as those outside the gender binary, to construct and explore their identity. Analysis of fanfiction presents a window into identities that are not commonly found in mainstream media (Busse and Hellekson, 2006; Rose, 2018; Seifrit, 2021); to my knowledge, few researchers have studied the link between identity, gender, and desire in writing with respect to transgender identities.

J.K. Rowling’s increasingly hostile attitude towards the trans community has been met with an increase in re-imaginings of her characters, stories, and worlds as trans-affirming. This project aims to explore the ways in which gender identity is constructed and maintained throughout the most popular Harry Potter fanfictions featuring transgender characters, particularly with respect to neopronouns and xenogenders (pronouns existing outside the binary, such as xe/xem or fae/faer). The analysis will be carried out with a Python script that scrapes data from the 100 most popular fanfictions tagged with ‘Trans Character’ in the Harry Potter category. Fanfiction is inherently multimodal in nature (Sindoni, 2015) and the site facilitates connection within the trans commnity, so this analysis will be combined with a closer qualitative analysis into a sample of Author’s Notes and comments in order to elucidate further the link between language and individual identity in this context.

My hypothesis is that the language used fits into two categories: medicalised stories focusing on the embodied self and the physical transitions that may come with being transgender, and stories that view gender as fluid, ever-changing, and malleable. I believe that authors in the first category both subvert and maintain the gender binary, whereas the latter are more consciously and explicitly rejecting this binary. I aim to compare this data with analogous data scraped from the top 100 fanfictions from The Magnus Archives, a UK-based podcast written by queer- and trans-accepting authors, containing a number of trans-coded supernatural characters. I predict that the trans-affirming Magnus Archives fanfictions will contain a higher proportion of fluid, xenogender-heavy language as a result of the creators’ acceptance of those whose identities are marginalised. Conversely, I predict that Harry Potter fanfictions will contain a higher proportion of medicalised, binary transgender identities, as the fans try to normalise that which the creator has deemed abnormal.

Overall, the relationship between (cisgender) masculinity, power, and desire in fanfiction has been studied from many different perspectives (Zimman, 2020 & 2021; Duggan, 2021); I hope to continue this work by looking at the relationship between the fan’s self-affirming language in different forms, and the author’s transphobic or accepting views expressed elsewhere.