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From yet another Weasley jumper to Dobby’s crazy socks to Dumbledore’s love of knitting patterns, fibre arts play a crucial role in the Harry Potter world. In addition to those already named, known fibre artists include Molly Weasley, Hermione Granger, Sybil Trelawney, Rubeus Hagrid, and an unnamed Black Family member, who each create textiles for multiple uses and motivations. Whether to show an emotional tie to one another, such as the Weasley family jumpers, or to show inclusion (or the lack thereof), as with Walburga’s Family Tapestry, fibre arts are never just fibre arts. Hermione’s elf-hats are a symbol of rebellion against pure-blood ideals; Trelawney’s needlework echoes the age-old trope of the Fates, spinning away at the threads of life. But the most surprising of all, knitting, needlework, fibre arts and craft throughout the Harry Potter world highlight and exemplify ideas of gender equality and acceptance.
J.K. Rowling’s stance on gender is well-known by now, and I’m not going to add volume to her transphobic ideas by restating them here. Yet, however loud she rants against gender acceptance, her magnum opus cries against her, and uses fibre arts in sly and subversive ways to reinforce inclusion.
Are the Harry Potter novels actually gender-inclusive?
Yes! The world Rowling has created celebrates gender diversity in a variety of ways, which would no doubt give the author herself quite a case of indigestion.
With all the noise around toilets, gendered bathrooms, and lurking dangers — it’s interesting that Rowling uses a toilet as one of the key settings for The Chamber of Secrets. Technically, Moaning Myrtle’s toilet is a “girls' toilet” — a fact she announces, loudly, to Harry and Ron when speaking of her death. However, despite being very obviously gendered, Myrtle’s toilets become a unisex space. Harry and Ron are anxious the first time they enter, but soon enough they become quite comfortable, brewing an illegal potion and then interrogating Myrtle. The only person who expresses doubt about the two boys being in what is clearly a female setting is Percy, who is immediately dismissed. In fact, Ron argues, “Why shouldn’t we be here?” (CS; “The Writing on the Wall”).
But it is the potion the trio was brewing in that bathroom that gives the most compelling argument in favor of gender inclusivity: Polyjuice Potion.
The hour-long limit of Polyjuice allows for gender exploration and experimentation. While some may see the time limit as a drawback, making permanent transition either impossible (within canon), or reliant on further, future potions study (prevalent in fan-fiction), the opportunity to test the waters of gender expression is available to anyone with a potions NEWT, or an incredibly intelligent best friend (CS; “The Polyjuice Potion”).
In the creation of this potion, Rowling opens the door to the idea that body and identity can be different. One’s body might look like Vincent Crabbe, but one’s self remains Ron Weasley. It provides a physical shifting from one body to another, while the self, and thus, the true gender remains intact. This is perhaps best shown in The Deathly Hallows:
He felt like asking them to show a little more respect for his privacy as they all began stripping off with impunity, clearly more at ease with displaying his body than they would have with their own […] “Harry, your eyesight really is awful,” said Hermione, as she put on glasses. (DH: “The Seven Potters,” emphasis mine)
In spite of obviously having, for the moment, Harry’s physical body (and presumably his genitals), Hermione remains herself—Rowling reinforces this idea with the use of the feminine personal pronoun, she. Hermione’s true gender, in this moment at least, has no reference to her physical body’s appearance.
But what has all this got to do with knitting?
Bear with me, and let’s first explore the history of gender and the fibre arts. We can put it all together later.
“Textile art, much like folk art, has largely been attributed to women’s work and craft” (Rogers). But this has not always been so.
Originally, textile work was men’s work, performed largely by sailors and fishermen for both decorative and functional purposes. They braided and knotted rope and wove nets for use on ships, often using knitting stitches to create or mend those tools. With their down time at sea and limited entertainment options, they also knitted garments both for themselves and those back home (Watterson 2010). Tailors and haberdasherers were masculine professions, and the men who held them outfitted the upper and working classes with the clothing and decorative items necessary to show off their wealth.
This went on until the Victorian age. During the Industrial Revolution, textile production became automated, and knitters, weavers, and embroiderers no longer needed to produce hand work. Knitting, embroidery, and hand sewing then became the province of women. A growing middle class meant husbands and fathers who worked outside the home, while “women who stayed at home became anxious for a purpose and expression of the self, so they knitted” (Pearl-McPhee 2005). Fibre arts became an entertainment; one exclusively for women.
Thus, handknitted or hand crafted textiles became something of a status symbol. Only those with the leisure to stay home had the free time to indulge in such a hobby. “Rather than an occupational and survival tool, knitting became a feminine pastime. As knitting became a feminine gendered activity, knitting as the activity also adopted society’s assigned characteristics of the female gender” (MNANNEY 2017). Labeled as “women’s work,” these arts became synonymous with femininity, and a woman’s worth was often measured by the fineness of her embroidery or the evenness of her stitches.
As the fibre arts moved more and more firmly into the feminine sphere, men who involved themselves in such concerns were judged more and more harshly by a society strictly divided along supposed gender lines. “Men cannot be passive knitters, but rather the masculine receiver of these delicate hand-made gifts that symbolize the love and emotions that went into its labor” (MNANNEY 2017). Men’s fashions underwent a change during this time as well—no longer adorned with silk and embroidery, wigs and high heels, fashions for men took a steep turn toward sober colours and limited adornments. As men became less involved in the production of fibre arts, their use of hand-crafted items also became more stringent and practical.
But fibre art has become much more than just granny squares and doilies. “During the twentieth century, textile art has developed and been used as a subversive political medium in art” (Rogers). As one of the few outlets considered socially acceptable for female artistic expression, fibre art became as liberated as the women who engaged in these pastimes.
As women struggled for suffrage, fibre arts took on political tones. Suffragettes knitted in prison, and one, Maud Arncliffe Sennet, described her struggle thus: “We knit and we fight; our needles are our weapons” (Eustance 1993). As the suffragettes knitted for their rights, so did those fighting for Civil Rights, Gay Rights, and Gender Rights. As recently as 2017, and in response to political statements, fibre artists expressed a desire for equality with the rise of the “Pussyhat,” which has since become a “social movement focused on raising awareness about women's issues and advancing human rights by promoting dialogue and innovation through the arts, education and intellectual discourse” (Zweiman 2017).
In recent years, men are also reclaiming the art, and have flooded social media and the internet with groups, posts, forums, and safe spaces for men to express their love of fibre art and knitting. Society has been moving steadily away from division on strict gender lines—and as in society, so in the fibre art world.
So, can we finally talk about gendered fibre arts in Harry Potter?
Sure! And to do so, I want to focus on two knitters specifically—and probably not the two you imagine. Molly’s jumpers are infamous, but her knitting serves predictable purposes of belonging, inclusion, warmth—both physical and emotional. Hermione’s more subversive knitting is certainly interesting, but freeing House-Elves has little to do with gender.
I want to talk about the men who knit. We are introduced to the magical world by Rubeus Hagrid as he takes an eleven-year-old Harry Potter to Diagon Alley for the first time: “Hagrid took up two seats and sat knitting what looked like a canary-yellow circus tent” (PS: Diagon Alley). Hagrid is a huge man. When he arrives at the Hut on the Rock, he’s described as a giant:
His face was almost completely hidden by a long, shaggy mane of hair and a wild, tangled beard, but you could make out his eyes, glinting like black beetles under all the hair. [He] squeezed his way into the hut, stooping so that his head just brushed the ceiling. He bent down, picked up the door, and fitted it easily back into its frame (PS: Keeper of the Keys).
Not only is Hagrid huge, he’s bearded, muscular, and incredibly strong. He regularly wrestles dangerous creatures in his work at Hogwarts (eg. hippogriffs, thestrals). He’s gruff, physical, and outdoorsy—he is the very definition of “a man’s man.”
And yet, he knits.
Before we get into his reasons why, let’s consider the other man who (presumably) also knits: Albus Dumbledore. We get the evidence of his knitting in The Half-blood Prince:
“I was merely reading the muggle magazines,” said Dumbledore. “I do love knitting patterns” (HBP: Horace Slughorn).
Now, we never see Dumbledore actually taking up the needles and wool, but it’s a rare person who loves knitting patterns but doesn’t actually knit.
Dumbledore’s knitting matters as he is one of the most, if not the most, powerful people in the entire Wizarding world. We hear about it when Hagrid tells Harry about him:
“They wanted Dumbledore fer Minister, o’course, but he’d never leave Hogwarts, so old Cornelius Fudge got the job. Bungler if ever there was one. So he pelts Dumbledore with owls every morning asking fer advice.” (PS: Diagon Alley)
Dumbledore is the headmaster, the chief warlock, the grand sorcerer, the chief mugwump. He has the Minister for Magic asking his counsel. He is the most well-known and beloved wizard in all of Britain, if not throughout the rest of the world as well.
And yet, he knits.
The two most manly, most masculine, most powerful men in the Harry Potter world engage publicly and proudly in an art form that has, for centuries, been the exclusive domain of women.
And I love them for it. When Hagrid knits his yellow circus tent, he is doing much more than simply counting his stitches. He’s breaking down walls that have existed for far too long, and providing a space for the potential breaking of other gender stereotypes. When Dumbledore professes his love of knitting patterns, he’s excusing his long absence, but he’s also normalizing the crossing of traditional gendered boundaries.
So what? Who cares? Why does this matter?
It matters because Rowling’s transphobia is getting louder, gaining a larger audience, and driving people away from what ought to be (and in fact, is) a safe place. Fandom has taken Harry Potter, and exploded every possibility that exists and then invented a few more that didn’t. And despite Rowling’s hate, the Harry Potter books— the very thing that gives her a platform—cry against her.
Surely that matters.
It matters because one of the main purposes of fibre arts is inclusivity: identifying those who belong, sheltering them, and welcoming others.
It matters because fibre arts and artists are rooted in the rebellious and stubborn, historically flipping the bird at those who deny others basic civil liberties.
It matters because in a world that protests Drag Queens reading storybooks to kids, people ought to listen to a man “wearing long robes, a purple cloak that swept the ground, and high-heeled, buckled boots” (PS) who once said:
“It matters not what someone is born, but what they grow to be” (GoF).