Almost getting past the "thought blurps" now!

Here we go. One hour.

The way that Rowling is able to convey the frustration behind gender roles is in a way almost non-chelaunt. She never comes out and says that the way society views gender is wrong, but she alludes to this idea several times in each of the seven books in the series.



J.K. Rowling being forced into hiding her first name (using initials as to appear like a male author)

Hermione being allowed in the boys dormitory, but when the boys try to get into the girl's dormitory, the stairs turn into a slide (the girls inform Harry and Ron that this is because the Hogwarts Founders believed girls to be more trustworthy than boys). Ron and Harry are also judged for going into the girl's bathroom by Moaning Myrtle and Percy (Ron's brother Percy is more concerned with Ron coming out of the girl's bathroom than asking him what he was even doing in there) but Myrtle later on in the fourth book is allowed to go into whatever bathroom she wants, and there is even a mermaid in the bathroom while the boys are there.

The way that Rowling introduces the first girls in the book (besides Aunt Petunia) is
1) Ginny as a small, red-headed girl who is told to be quiet before she even finishes a question
             Incidentally, Ginny is the only daughter in the Weasley family, and she is seen as painfully                    
            shy around Harry. We don't see much of her at all unless she's needing to be rescued from the  
            Chamber of Secrets or turning red and doing embarrassing things in front of Harry. Because
            Harry is whose eyes we are looking through, we see Ginny (and all girls) the way he would
            see them.

2) Hermione is introduced as having a "bossy sort of voice, lots of brown bushy hair, and rather large front teeth. She is immediately seen as obnoxious and annoying to the boys, but not cruel. She's just seen as really weird. Because girls often internalize how they feel, a girl reading this part would relate to Hermione, whereas a boy reading it would relate to Harry and Ron. Having the main character be a boy allows readers who are boys to see the emotions they might possibly feel on a regular basis put into words. Girls don't need their emotions explained by someone else; they can do it themselves just fine. Emotions are often associated with weakness, and so boys are not willing or able to admit that they have "feelings" often at the age of eleven. They tease by calling each other "girls" or "babies," and at that age, they feel like knowing too much is a bad thing. They don't want to be seen as "too smart" or as teacher's pets, because that wouldn't be as "cool." Ron doesn't even want to be associated with Hermione, as he states he hopes they aren't in the same house. When immediately juxtaposed with Draco Malfoy, Hermione is seen to readers as far less of a bother. Malfoy puts himself in the "enemy" category, so instead of positioning her main conflict around how boys feel versus how girls feel, J.K. Rowling shows that she isn't as concerned with the romance aspect that boys will tend to shy away from.

Another point is how Harry is drawn towards his male teachers more so than his female professors. He has more of a connection with Hagrid, Dumbledore, and Lupin than he does with Trelawney, Sprout, or even Madame Hooch, who is the overseer of Quidditch. Harry appreciates McGonagall after a few books, when he realizes that she doesn't favor anyone - she is universally strict. But he still has a much stronger connection with his male professors.

Quidditch is another interesting point to be made... the only competitive wizard sport ever mentioned in any of the books is one where boys and girls both can play on the same team. The school teams are comprised of males and females... Angelina is even the team captain in the fifth book. In the fourth book, when Harry goes to the Quidditch World Cup, there are males and females on the professional teams. This is never the case when it comes to competitive sports today (*I'd like to continue hunting for sources about this particular point... it really drives the main idea, that Rowling did and wrote what she did on purpose... to show that she could write a book for boys AND girls). Football, basketball and baseball, the three most watched and played sports in the United States, are made of teams comprised only of males, while there are also teams for women only... there is never a combination of both genders. There's a Huffington Post article about how Quidditch is the only sport with a rule of two-gender minimum.

OH!!!! I ran out of time. But there's basically an hours worth of hashing out my ideas into more than just little thought blurps. That's what I set out to do today... was to go off the different ideas I've been thinking about, and see what I can come up with in an hour.

P.S.... no violin today! I was the only one home! But because our apartment is the show apartment, I was interrupted three times by three gaggles of girls wanting to look at the size of my bathroom. Other than that, however, I feel like this was the most productive hour I've had working on formulating actual sentences rather than "blurps." I was mainly focused on getting my ideas out there rather than forming a solid introduction, which was a nice change from last time.