Being a Witch: Feminist Reception and Retributive Speech Acts

• In Event: Legibility and Violence in Feminist Political Theory

Abstract

“We are the granddaughters of the witches you failed to burn,” a common sign at anti-Trump protests states. What is it about the witch and her historical lineage that feminists find so affectively and politically appealing? In this paper, I explore how the figure of the witch occupies a particular spot within the feminist imaginary: She is symbolic of women, who across time and space, are imagined as refusing demands to shut up and acquiesce to normatively proscribed roles. Implicit in notions of the witch is something of the extraordinary, powers that surpass those of mere men. These are powers that if tested could be used to exact vengeance. However – and perhaps resultantly - the trope of the witch continues to be used to ostracize and dismiss women who speak out against the dominant order. In this paper, I ask two questions: First, why do feminists in this political moment adopt the witch as a political strategy to get heard? Second, how does the language of refusal, retribution, and threat operate as part of this “witchy” appeal? What is this language’s relationship to feminist reception and the promise of the figure of the witch? In this paper, I engage speech act theory (Austin 1962) and affect (Cvetkovich 2012; Ahmed 2004; Berlant 2000) to explore how refusal, retribution, and threat manifest in recent feminist and political performances of the witch. Conceptualizing refusal, threat, and the promise of magical retribution as a type of performative speech act, I trace how the figure of the witch taps into latent feminist desires for vengeance and, resultantly, how feminist audiences receive such speech acts. By making room for a type of affect that is unsettling and ambiguous, by performing as witches – as a historical threat to power – can feminists get heard?

Author

• Kimberly Killen, University of Colorado, Boulder