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OPINION: Witches are the perfect feminist symbol – they apparently support abortion and hate capitalism

Move over zombie studies – two professors have created a new academic field called “feminist witch studies.”

University of California Santa Barbara Professor Jane Ward recently co-authored a book called “The Witch Studies Reader,” with Michigan State University Professor Soma Chaudari.

“A central theme of the book is how witchcraft serves as a powerful form of feminist and decolonial resistance,” a UCSB news release explains. “The book illustrates how practices historically demonized as witchcraft — such as midwifery, herbal medicine and abortion care — have enabled women to exist and operate outside of state and capitalist control.”

Pro-abortion AND anti-capitalist? It makes sense now why a feminist studies professor embraces the topic.

Ward, who previously developed a course on “Critical Heterosexuality Studies,” said the word “witch” can have many different meanings to people who use it.

“For some, ‘witch’ is a patriarchal slur that they reclaim for resistance,” she said. “For others, it’s an identity tied to essential feminine magic, or a deeply queer figure who exists in defiance of rigid gender norms.”

“We’ve seen people using the concept of the curse, the hex and the spell as ways to push back against gendered violence and oppression,” she also said in the university news release.

They want their fellow gender studies professors to use a “a feminist, decolonial lens” to analyze witches, which will reveal “critical insights about power, resistance and history.”

Duke University Press is publishing the book. A summary of the contents sounds like an Alan Sokal hoax, but apparently is quite real:

This reader stems from our longing not just to place witches’ voices alongside feminist academic examinations of witchcraft, but to make clear that scholars and witches are sometimes the same people. From a decolonial feminist perspective, this overlap makes sense, as witches are keepers of suppressed knowledges, manifesters of new futures, exemplars of praxis, and theorists in their own right. Just as importantly, we envisioned a reader that would trace points of departure and convergences as we followed the witch across the globe, looking for new understandings that upend the white supremacist, colonial, patriarchal knowledge regimes that informed many previous writings. And, thus, the global witch studies reader was launched as an effort to call into existence a new interdisciplinary field of feminist witch studies.

The book includes entries like “Justice-Centered Tarot in and Against the New Age,” “Ecstatic Desires: Queerness and the Witch’s Body,” and “Crafting Against Capitalism: Queer Longings for Witch Futures.”

What is not clear from reading the entries and description is how an academic field focused on patriarchy, anti-capitalism, and disordered sexuality is “new.”

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IMAGE CAPTION AND CREDIT: A woman dressed like a witch holds up a spell book; Eugene Lisyuk/Pexels

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