Twinship, incest, and twincest in the Harry Potter universe

Authors

  • Vera Cuntz-Leng PhD Student at the Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen (Germany), visiting researcher at UC Berkeley

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.3983/twc.2014.0576

Keywords:

Fan community, Fan fiction, Slash

Abstract

Among the large group of Harry Potter fans who write their own stories about the boy wizard, his friends, and his foes, and publish them on the Internet, some are interested in the exploration of the erotic and romantic bond between identical twins. Because the Harry Potter saga features two sets of identical twin pairs of different gender—the Weasley brothers and the Patil sisters—the series not only provides a unique playground for the recipients in terms of the possibilities for twincest stories; more importantly, it offers ample opportunity for researchers to examine how fans actually use such pairings. In this essay, the examination of twin relationships as portrayed within Rowling's works, the movies, and in twincest fan fiction are confronted with each other to outline how Rowling's different concepts of the sibling pairs and the author's general ongoing interest in doubling motifs is consistently expanded by fan fiction writers to discuss the complex relationship between source and fan text.

Author Biography

Vera Cuntz-Leng, PhD Student at the Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen (Germany), visiting researcher at UC Berkeley

Vera Cuntz-Leng (*1979) studied film and theater science in Mainz, Marburg, and Vienna. She is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Media Studies at the Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen with a thesis on queer readings of Harry Potter. Currently, she is a visiting researcher at the Berkeley Center for New Media of UC Berkeley. She has published on Harry Potter, fandom and subculture, Science Fiction and Fantasy film, color aesthetics, Indian cinema, Japanese cinema, and Peter Weir.

Downloads

Published

2014-09-15

Issue

Vol. 17 (2014)

Section

Praxis

License

TWC Nos. 25 onward are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC by 4.0). For an explanation of the journal's reasoning, see the TWC editorial Copyright and Open Access. TWC Nos. 1 through 24 are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC 3.0) license, with TWC, not the author, retaining copyright.

Presses whose policies require written permission for reproduction should contact the TWC Editor; such permission is routinely given for no fee.