The organized life of Harry Potter fans

Abstract The Harry Potter series has become one of the main products of the history of the entertainment industry, having a huge cultural impact and being emblematic of a generation of fans, called potterheads. It arose in a context of globalization and of great technological development, which greatly affected the modes of sociability. This scenario brought the culture of convergence, resulting from the approximation between culture, communication and media convergence, which established a close and unprecedented relational network between technology, media producers and fan communities. In this context, the practices of these communities establish truths, influence individuals shape social relations and promote activism, being a contemporary way of being organized, whose way of life is maintained by the imbrication with ordinary management processes and social spaces. This study investigates these processes starting from the following research question: how potterheads govern their life organized? From a documental archive of potterhead practices collected in digital media, we conducted a Foucauldian Discourse Analysis. The research revealed a discursive formation indicative of government relations given from the care of the self and the other within of a dispositif system, which legitimizes and orders the way potterheads are organized, establishing it as a subjectivity ground for these fans. Our contribution is on revealing how, in the uniqueness of an organizational process, the management is given by strategies of government guided by an imbricated relationship between power technologies and self-technologies.