Two Australian academics working in celebrity studies have published an article 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. The article, from the 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.'
Rowling 'was a global prestigious celebrity,' the authors 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.
According to authors Sarah Scales and Joanna McIntyre, 'celebrified transphobia' happens when 'cis celebrities entering public discourse about trans people use their elevated social platform to espouse transphobia. We identify this evil twin of trans celebrity activism as celebrified transphobia, a relatively new, mediated and worryingly emblazoned form of transphobia.'
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.
If you have read the Harry Potter books, you are 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 shrink or shriek in horror at the mere mention or thought of his name, hence Voldemort's 'he who must not be named' moniker. 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 one in 15 persons on this planet have read one of her Harry Potter books. Hardly a week passes that Rowling is not trending on social media for her latest work or commentary. 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.'
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.
