Rhetorical Analysis on Harry's Girls

Meredith Cherland’s article,“ Harry’s Girls: Harry Potter and the Discourse of Gender”, was published in December 2008  Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy. Meredith Cherland had thirty eight years of experience in the education field from being a junior high English teacher to a professor of education at University of Regina in Saskatchewan, Canada. After reading this piece, I feel that Cherland’s beliefs about the issues of gender are very liberal and she wants to inform other teachers and their students of ways to open their mind to different perspectives about gender. Cherland’s tone in the article was very casual but yet informative towards her readers. Cherland assumed that her readers would be literary teachers that wanted to teach and show their students ways to be aware about society’s norms in dealing with the issues about gender, in hopes that they could change.

In Cherland’s article, she explained feminist poststructural theory and how it could help secondary teachers and their students in hopes of understanding how young adults can challenge the norms of our society when it comes to the subject of gender. Cherland explained how our society has humanistic views and how we pass those views on to our children from generation to generation.  Cherland claimed that poststructural theory can help teachers and their students to change their humanistic views and open their eyes to both worldviews about gender.  

Cherland defines her key terms in the piece very clearly and is very organized for anyone to understand. Cherland used the last four novels in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series as an example on how to use poststructural theory in modern literature to empower students to change the world in hopes for a better future. J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series are a popular culture phenomenon worldwide that most children, teens, and adults know about, either from the books or movies.  

Cherland also provided teaching strategies to help teachers apply this theory in their classrooms at the end of the article. Literary teachers can use these strategies in their classroom as individual or group activities with their students using any popular culture literature. These strategies can help students examine the literature and find examples of humanism and poststructural theory within the texts. Her hopes for this is to help students, so that they can write about a world that is open minded about gender instead of a world with humanistic views.

            In the beginning of Cherland’s piece, she establishes her credibility, or ethos. She connects to her audience by stating that she is a fellow teacher and a Harry Potter fan. She also defines and explains key concepts so her audience could understand the meaning of poststructural theory. Her purpose was to educate these teachers about humanism and poststructural theory so that they could apply it with their students in hopes that these students when they become adults and can change the society’s norms about the subject of gender. Cherland’s piece is organized in two columns throughout most of the article so that it is easy to visually quick scan. The article did not affect my understanding of gender personally. But it did highlight new ways to study gender in modern literature and other popular culture.

Cherland, Meredith. “Harry’s Girls: Harry Potter and the Discourse of Gender.” Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy 52.4 (2009): 273-282.Online. 9 June 2011.