ABSTRACT
Though J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter is ‘small and skinny for his age’ with ‘glasses held together with a lot of Scotch tape’, throughout the series he accrues many indicators of successful hegemonic masculinity: special status as ‘The Boy Who Lived’, a Gringott's vault full of gold, the distinction of becoming Gryffindor's youngest Seeker in a century, and romantic successes with Cho Chang and Ginny Weasley. Harry's deepest desire, however, as revealed by the Mirror of Erised in The Philosopher's Stone, is a loving ‘normal’ family, a wish that we finally see granted in the Epilogue to The Deathly Hallows. This essay will examine the male characters in the Harry Potter heptalogy through the lens of their masculinity—hegemonic or non-hegemonic—and their often complex experiences of familial and quasi-familial relationships, looking at whether hegemonic families in children's and YA literature produce hegemonically masculine boys.
