Stories about witches are by their nature stories about the most basic and profound of human experiences—healing, sex, violence, tragedies, aging, death, and encountering the mystery and magic of the unknown. It is no surprise, then, that witches loom large in our cultural imaginations. In academia, studies of witches rarely emerge from scholars who are themselves witches and/or embedded in communities of witchcraft practitioners. The Witch Studies Reader brings together a diverse group of scholars, practitioners, and scholar-practitioners who examine witchcraft from a critical decolonial feminist perspective that decenters Europe and departs from exoticizing and pathologizing writing on witchcraft in the global South. The authors show how witches are keepers of suppressed knowledges, builders of new futures, exemplars of praxis, and theorists in their own right. Throughout, they account for the vastly different national, political-economic, and cultural contexts in which “the witch” is currently being claimed and repudiated. Offering a pathbreaking transnational feminist examination of witches and witchcraft that upends white supremacist, colonial, patriarchal knowledge regimes, this volume brings into being the interdisciplinary field of feminist witch studies.
Contributors. Maria Amir, Ruth Asiimwe, Bernadette Barton, Ethel Brooks, Shelina Brown, Ruth Charnock, Soma Chaudhuri, Carolyn Chernoff, Saira Chhibber, Simon Clay, Krystal Cleary, Adrianna L. Ernstberger, Tina Escaja, Laurie Essig, Marcelitte Failla, D Ferrett, Marion Goldman, Jaime Hartless, Margaretha Haughwout, Patricia Humura, Apoorvaa Joshi, Govind Kelkar, Oliver Kellhammer, Ayça Kurtoğlu, Helen Macdonald, Isabel Machado, Brandy Renee McCann, Dev Nathan, Mary Jo Neitz, Amy Nichols-Belo, Allison (or AP) Pierce, Emma Quilty, Anna Rogel, Karen Schaller, Jacquelyn Marie Shannon, Shashank Shekhar Sinha, Gabriella V. Smith, Nathan Snaza, Shannon Hughes Spence, Eric Steinhart, Morena Tartari, Nicole Trigg, Katie Von Wald, Tushabe wa Tushabe, Jane Ward
- Cover
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: Manifesting Witch Studies / Soma Chaudhuri and Jane Ward
- I. The Colonial Encounter
- One. Witchcraft in My Community: Healing Sex and Sexuality / Tushabe wa Tushabe, Patricia Humura, and Ruth Asiimwe
- Two. “What Is a Witch?”: Tituba’s Subjunctive Challenge / Nathan Snaza
- Three. Irish Feminist Witches: Using Witchcraft and Activism to Heal from Violence and Trauma / Shannon Hughes Spence
- Four. Whose Craft?: Contentions on Open and Closed Practice in Contemporary Witchcraft(s) / Apoorvaa Joshi and Ethel Brooks
- II. Lineages of Healing
- Five. “You Deserve, Baby!”: Spiritual Co-creation, Black Witches, and Feminism / Marcelitte Failla
- Six. Resurrecting Granny: A Brief Excavation of Appalachian Folk Magic / Brandy Renee Mccann
- Seven. “Some Decks May Be Stacked against Us but This Deck Is Ours”: Justice-Centered Tarot in and against the New Age / Krystal Cleary
- Eight. Ecstatic Desires: Queerness and the Witch’s Body / Simon Clay and Emma Quilty
- Nine. Deitsch Magic Past and Future / Eric Steinhart
- Ten. “We Are Here with Our Rebellious Joy”: Witches and Witchcraft in Turkey / Ayça Kurtoğlu
- Eleven. Fortune-Telling, Women’s Friendship, and Divination Commodification in Contemporary Italy / Morena Tartari
- III. Killing the Witch
- Twelve. A Feminist Theory of Witch Hunts / Govind Kelkar and Dev Nathan
- Thirteen. Occult Violence and the Savage Slot: Understanding Tanzanian Witch-Killings in Historical and Ethnographic Context / Amy Nichols-Belo
- Fourteen. Going All the Way: From Village to Supreme Court for a Witch-Killing in Central India / Helen Macdonald
- Fifteen. Contemporary Trends in Witch-Hunting in India / Shashank Shekhar Sinha
- Sixteen. Bewitching Gender History / Adrianna L. Ernstberger
- IV. Art, Aesthetics, and Cultural Production
- Seventeen. Mista Boo: Portrait of a Drag Witch / Isabel Machado
- Eighteen. Witching Sound in the Anthropocene (and Occultcene) / D Ferrett
- Nineteen. A Witch’s Guide to the Underground: Sixties Counterculture, Dianic Wicca, and the Cultural Trope of the “Witchy Diva” / Shelina Brown
- Twenty. A Queer Critical Analysis of Contemporary Representations of the Churail in Hindi Film / Saira Chhibber
- Twenty-one. Pakistan’s Churails: Young Feminists Choosing “Witch” Way Is Forward / Maria Amir
- Twenty-two. From “Born This Witch” to “Bad Bitch Witch”: A History of Witch Representation in Western Pop Culture / Jaime Hartless and Gabriella V. Smith
- Twenty-three. “I Put a Spell on You and Now You’re Mine”: A Vulvacentric Reading of Witchcraft / Anna Rogel
- V. Protest and Reclaiming
- Twenty-four. Hexing the Patriarchy: The Revolutionary Aesthetics of W.I.T.C.H. / Carolyn Chernoff
- Twenty-five. Witch-Ins and Other Feminist Acts / Tina Escaja and Laurie Essig
- Twenty-six. Disappearing Acts: Attending “Witch School” in Brooklyn, New York / Jacquelyn Marie Shannon
- Twenty-seven. We Are All Witches: My Pagan Journey / Bernadette Barton
- VI. Witch Epistemologies
- Twenty-eight. Witching the Institution: Academia and Feminist Witchcraft / Ruth Charnock and Karen Schaller
- Twenty-nine. A Ruderal Witchcraft Manifesto / Margaretha Haughwout and Oliver Kellhammer
- Thirty. Feminism as a Demon, or, The Difference Witches Make: Chiara Fumai with Carla Lonzi / Nicole Trigg
- Thirty-one. Religion and Magic through Feminist Lenses / Mary Jo Neitz and Marion S. Goldman
- Thirty-two. Crafting against Capitalism: Queer Longings for Witch Futures / Katie Von Wald and AP Pierce
- Contributors
- Index
- A
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- D
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- I
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- K
- L
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- P
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- R
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