Witches and Wild Women: Bad Girls of the Anthropocene

• In Event: 63.070 - Bad Girl Theory and Practice: Qualitative Research in Post-Truth Times

Abstract

Purpose
The bad girl is (in) an impossible position. The paper notes how the bad girl, though potentially powerful, can also be toxic or inefficacious, both as a figure for ‘Theory’, and as an identity ascription for girls and grown women. It asks who/what might be the bad girl’s unnatural kin in the anthropocene, where theory is belatedly looking for modes of thought and action to counter the human exceptionalism that has poisoned planetary futures. It proposes the witch as a figure of feminist, posthuman agency, and offers some methodological proposals for ‘wilder’ research in education.
Theoretical framework
The paper draws on recent reclamations of witchcraft and divinatory practices in Deleuzian and speculative philosophy (Deleuze, 2004; Ramey, 2012; Stengers, 2008; Deleuze & Guattari, 1994). It is informed in particular by Stengers’ advocacy of the modern witch as practitioner of the pragmatic and speculative arts of ‘immanent discrimination’ who senses that which is coming into existence in order to forge lines of flight (after Deleuze and Guattari, 1987).
Argument
The field of educational research is indebted to the insubordinate critique and the intransigent intelligence of generations of outstandingly bad girls who are also exceedingly good scholars. But the appellation of bad girl remains a real threat for young women, who still are liable to have their supposed badness aggressively disciplined. The bad girl has also enjoyed a dubious status as the dark muse of post-structural theory, where the liminality of the girl, and the woman she portends, have been romanticised as the force that evades representation: c.f. Deleuze’s (2004) Alice, or Derrida’s (1978) ‘untruth of truth’ (Derrida, 1978). The paper turns instead to the witch, who fabricates ‘efficacious propositions’ (Stengers, 2008) that resist capture by the judgemental reason of modernity, and the voracious apparatuses of capitalism that such reasoning serves. There is further value, it is argued, in reclaiming the association of the witch with the old crone or hag. Arguing for a ‘rewilding’ of theory, Halberstam and Nyong’o (2018: 456) assert that the wild ‘can be that which has gone to seed, that which failed to thrive, those who are both in and out of the game… even neutral and sterile.’ They commend practices of ‘forgetting, senility, menopause, and absentmindedness as evasions of compulsory performances of youthful rebellion’. In her unnatural encounters with nature, and the obstructive force of her cultural and biological uselessness, the crone may be the queer offspring of the bad girl.
Mode of inquiry
The paper is primarily conceptual, its data comprising philosophical formulations of witchcraft as method.
Results and significance
The paper contributes to the development of post-qualitative theory and methodology. In following the ‘witch’s flight’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994), methodology would be: transversal; ambulant – i.e. following the contours of abstract form; experimental; lodged in the queer temporality of the event; efficacious - concerned with what can be done, not what is meant; adept in forcefully wielding words for transformation, rather than explanation; sympathetic to more-than-human subjectivities.

Author

• Maggie Maclure, Manchester Metropolitan University