Feminist profs' book 'Witch Studies Reader' depicts witches as 'keepers of suppressed knowledges'
A newly-published book by two university professors is promoting 'feminist witch studies.'
Jane Ward, a professor and the department chair of Feminist Studies at UC Santa Barbara, is an editor of the new book, The Witch Studies Reader.
A newly-published book by two university professors is promoting “feminist witch studies.”
“Witchcraft has been feared, mocked and romanticized — but rarely has it been fully understood as a story of feminist resistance and enduring cultural power,” a recent University of California, Santa Barbara news article states.
Jane Ward, a professor and the department chair of Feminist Studies at UC Santa Barbara, is an editor of the new book, The Witch Studies Reader. Soma Chaudhuri, an associate professor at Michigan State University, is a co-editor of the book as well.
According to a description of The Witch Studies Reader, the contributors “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 Witch Studies Reader also seeks to shift the historical narrative on witches.
“The authors show how witches are keepers of suppressed knowledges, builders of new futures, exemplars of praxis, and theorists in their own right,” the description says. “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,” it continues.
For Ward, the image of a witch provides a useful way to fight what she sees as systems of power.
“Witchcraft is often about existing just outside state control and capitalism,” Ward told UC Santa Barbara’s The Current. “This makes it critical to understand witchcraft through a feminist lens — not just because women are typically its practitioners, but because of what makes it threatening to established power structures.”
Professor Ward has also written a book called The Tragedy of Heterosexuality, in which she “encourages straight men and women to take a page out of queer culture, reminding them ‘about the human capacity to desire, f**k, and show respect at the same time.’”
Campus Reform contacted Jane Ward and Soma Chaudhuri for comment. This article will be updated accordingly.
