Carved in Stone, Written in Law: Material-Discursive Politics of Magical Governance in the Potterverse

Authors : Şafak Horzum

Pages : 563-581

Doi:10.51290/dpusbe.1768305

View : 106 | Download : 218

Publication Date : 2025-10-25

Article Type : Research Paper

Abstract :This article analyzes the juridical, visual, and economic apparatuses that structure interspecies relations in J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, reading them through critical posthumanism and biopolitical theory. While the series celebrates moral courage and anti-authoritarian resistance, it also stages a world organized by species hierarchies, anthropocentric law, and aestheticized sovereignty. Drawing on Karen Barad’s agential realism, Giorgio Agamben’s concept of bare life, and Rosi Braidotti’s posthumanist ethics, the study examines three sites: monumental statuary such as the “Fountain of Magical Brethren” and the “Magic is Might” sculpture as material-discursive apparatuses encoding wizard supremacy; the Ministry of Magic’s evolving classifications of “beings,” “beasts,” and “spirits” as regulatory fictions rooted in anthropocentrism; and goblins’ exclusion from wand ownership and juridical agency as symptomatic of inclusive exclusion. Across these sites, the article argues that magical governance operates not as neutral bureaucracy but as an onto-epistemological matrix that legitimizes inequality while enabling moments of ethical friction and cross-species solidarity. Thus, the study contributes to scholarship in fantasy studies, political theory, and critical posthumanism, revealing how the wizarding world mirrors and critiques real-world regimes of classification, representation, and exclusion, while leaving the horizon of multispecies justice tantalizingly unfinished.
Keywords : Harry Potter, Posthümanizm, Biyopolitika, Tür hiyerarşisi, Büyülü yönetim, Eyleyicilik

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