Who gets to be a woman? The JK Rowling case and the sociology of morality

• In Event: 20420 - Section on Sociology of Culture Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): Table 1: Culture, Cognition, and Beliefs

Abstract

This paper is about the controversy surrounding JK Rowling, from the point of view of sociology of morality and moral change in newly evolving public (and digital) space. Rowlings’ social media interventions have ignited a major and ongoing, highly emotionalized and heated debate around gender issues. Current scholarly work on JK Rowling mainly focuses on her downfall and why her fans have turned their back on their once beloved and idolized author. The main driving emotions are anger and disappointment, as fans perceive JK Rowling to have betrayed her own moral values embedded into inclusionary politics and thus, abandoned the road to moral progress, i.e. including persons and groups of persons into existing individual rights of self-expression. Yet, on the basis of empirical research on the communications around this controversy in the traditional legacy and the new social media, I argue that the moral relevance of the case lies deeper: it consists of a change of morality itself. This is met with relentless resistance, because it is perceived as a destruction of the presumed common sense of who is a woman. To the degree that we can empirically see a struggle over the shifting meaning of “woman”, a sociological account of it not only illuminates one of the most contentious moral issues today but also helps us to understand moral change and conflict more generally.

Author

• Siglinde Peetz, University of Bern