Themes Of Contemporary Art Pdf

[Amabella Batton]

Wecannot deny that LEGO Harry Potter is a popular theme amongst adults and children, and as such, I have been interested to see if there has been any change in the gender representation in the minifigures over time.

As a popular theme, children may look to their sets to seek reflection of the world that they live in: in licensed themes, the minifigures have more realistic skin tones than yellow minifigures, and school is a relatable topic for many children, even if the English boarding school is not part of their personal experience. But as a girl playing with LEGO, you can probably relate to the female characters better than the male ones. As such, a level of representation within your avatars of play is helpful.

I acknowledge that JK Rowling, author of the Harry Potter books has made a number of public statements regarding transgender people, and these comments have caused significant distress to some members of the LGTBQ+ community and their supporters. The Rambling Brick does not support discrimination in any form. However, as a white middle aged male, I have no doubt that I have benefitted from a certain level of privilege in life , and have been guilty of inadvertent bias over the years. I hope to be continuing to learn, inform and improve myself.

Our partnership to create Wizarding World sets is with Warner Bros, not JK Rowling. Warner Brothers receives the royalty fees from the sales of LEGO Harry Potter sets. You will need to contact Warner Brothers directly to ask them how they distribute these funds.

Since Diversity and Inclusion are a focus for us, we also work with non-profit organisations that support LGBTQ+ children. In Connecticut we have donated to TRUE COLORS, a non-profit organisation that works with social service agencies, schools, organisations and within communities to ensure that the needs of sexual and gender minority youth are both recognised and competently met.

In the UK we are also working with Diversity Role Models, an organisation that helps to educate all children about the importance of inclusion and empathy for all.; and Albert Kennedy Trust, an organisation that provides housing and support for LGBTQ+ youth.

I recently reviewed the female representation in LEGO Star Wars, as seen between 2001 and 2020. While we saw an increase in the number of female characters represented as minifigures in recent years, this also coincides with an increase in the number of female characters appearing in the source material- be it cinema, television, comics or video games. Over this time, we have seen a 9 fold increase in the absolute number of female figures being produces, and a 3 fold increase in the percentage of representation.

LEGO Harry Potter is a little different. There has been no new source material released since the original movies ran their course in 2011. In that first release wave, we saw around 22% of minifigures represented female characters. Therefore, we might surmise that any change in the number of female characters produced might be more representative of moves within the LEGO Group to ensure a more equitable representation within the toy line.

My primary source of information regarding minifigures came from the brickset database, as well as information direct from the press release, relating to the 2021 June wave of sets. I included figures from LEGO Harry Potter sets, as well as the two Collectible Minifigure series. I did not include other Wizarding World figures, such as those relating to Fantastic Beasts, and Where To Find Them, or The Crimes of Grindelwald. I specifically flagged the Harry, Hermione and Ron figures, as they are characters with the most variations for subsequent analysis. I picked specifically through the list of sets, rather than the list of figures, as some figures appeared in multiple sets.

Characters were considered as a specific gender if they were obviously portrayed as one or other on screen. Non-human sentient species (house elf, goblin, centaur) were considered, but figures representing dementors and shop manniquns were not . I did not include any micro figures or nano figures (from LEGO Games, and the Hogwarts Castle) or golden 20th anniversary minifigures in my calculations.

Looking at these columns, it appears that there is a greater representation of female characters in the 2018 onward range, compared to the initial releases. I looked at this data as a percentage, to normalise against the number of figures produced each year:

Looking at this data, it would appear that there have been significantly more female figures as a propotion of the total being produced, compared in the 2018 onward releases. There also appears to have been an increase in the number of female minifigures releasented from 2020 and 2021 compared to the previous years.

Based on the annual graphs above, it appears that there might have been a change in policy with the 2020 products. There appears to be a quantum increment in the proportion of female minifigures included in sets at this time. So, I split the current 2018 onwards data into 2018-19, and 2020-21. Between these two periods, 2018-19 and 2019-20, we see the overall presentation of female characters increase from 27 to 37%, a fairly significant number.

These characters are important, as they occupy the bulk of the attention in the plot. They are also the characters that the kids will relate to. However, to maintain a sense of novelty when purchasing a new set, they also come in many variations. In fact, these three characters account for 143 of the 403 minifigures that appear in sets across the years. I suspect there are several ways we can consider the effect:

One would be to remove Harry Potter figures from the equation completely, but leave Ron and Hermione. If you opened every LEGO Harry Potter set, you would have 77 Harry Potter figures. Some might be duplicates. This constitutes almost 20% of all minifigures in the theme. Lowering the number of male figures from the total will increase the total proportion of female minifigures, across each epoch, most recently we see 44% female characters in 2020-21. But this is fairly selective data manipulation, designed to improve the female minifigure ratio.

I considered the gender mix of characters, removing Harry, Ron and Hermione from the selection. It would appear that these figures, as a population, represent a fairly consistent proportion across all time periods. As such, as you can see if you compare the below graph with the one in the previous paragraph, there is little differenceures:

Overall, I am quite excited to see this increasing trend of actively including female characters, particularly when the characters included are relevant to the plot, or the location that was used in the movie. Virtually every character in the movies had a name. Sometimes we may not have known who they were at the time, but they were included.

So for our final set of graphs, let us look at the number of CHARACTERS represented as minifigures in LEGO Harry Potter sets. This analysis eliminates ALL Variants: For each epoch, we get will only count each character once. Only one Harry Potter Figure. Only One Dumbledore. But also only one Hermione and one Luna Lovegood. Due to logisistical, domestic challenges, I was unable to split the modern epoch into the 2018-19 and 2020-21 periods.

You can argue that this might be a bit severe: Harry is represented with 3 different types of leg elements across the current range of sets, different uniforms, Quidditch robes, casual clothes. The same goes for many of the other students too. But bear with me, as I think it goes to the core of the way in which the Harry Potter Team have been making an effort to improve the variety of characters that are represented in the current run. To date, Almost every character who appeared in the first run (2001-2012) has appeared in the current series (either in a set, or as a CMF), but there are a few exceptions:

The upshot of these graphs: there are more characters represented in LEGO Minifigure form since 2018, than there were in the 2011-2012 run. We have also seen the percentage of female CHARACTERS increase from 23% to 35% of the total number of figures produced.

In the current run of Harry Potter (2018-present), we have also seen an increase in the racial diversity of minifigures visible in both sets and collectable minifigures: Cho Chang, Dean Thomas, Padma and Parvarti Patil: these figures, along with Seraphina Picquery from the Fantastic Creatures franchise, all have (medium) nougat skin tones; Kingsley Shacklebolt and Aurora Sinestra both have reddish brown skin tones.

These figures represent 10 of the close to 300 different minifigures ever released in LEGO Harry Potter sets. Around 3%. While this might not feel like many at this point, let us consider that in 2018, the first three of these was released, and in the previous production run (2001-2012) there were no people of colour in the LEGO Harry Potter Range to speak of.

For the purpose of this writing, a contextualisation regarding the concerns and ideologies of my practice (thought processes as sonic process; contributing towards a discourse that has not quite found a physical voice), I will discuss themes within contemporary pieces and theoretical texts that relate to the concerns and formation of my own work.

A juxtaposition of a mirroring of the two characters Lydia Lunch and William Lee, or Ann Koch and Burroughs (original names), I removed myself from their context and characterisations to form my own written and spoken cut-ups / fragmented texts in relation to the concept of my work.

As a reaction between gender and literary works, when considering the previous works of Lunch and Burroughs, I began to consider the relationship between writing and gender, as both discuss desires and sexual activity with the opposite sex, an addiction in which they both preferred. Although her abusive approach towards the male species, and the assumption that Burroughs was a misogynist as a result of his shooting his wife dead, almost becomes a contradiction, as she used this male motif as a structure to form her own work;

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