The Fairy Race: Artemis Fowl and Hierarchies of Race and Gender

Book chapter, 2021

In this chapter, I argue that, despite initially seeming to resist traditional ideas, Eoin Colfer's Artemis Fowl book series constructs a fantasy world that reinforces hidebound notions of gender and sexuality as well as of race, all of which these books interconnect. To do so, I first outline the conditions that raise the possibility that the Artemis Fowl series might celebrate gender queerness, and I explain how the books ultimately reinscribe cisgendered maleness as a precondition for excellence. I then discuss how in these books, the issue of race—both in the sense of the fairy and human races as well in the sense of ethnic races—celebrates racial and gender hierarchies. The chapter concludes with a discussion of how the books affect readers through their insistence upon the heroism of heteronormative whiteness.