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Feminist Afterlives of the Witch: Popular Culture, Memory, Activism (Palgrave Studies in
The book investigates the witch as a key rhetorical symbol in twentieth- and twenty-first century feminist memory, politics, activism, and popular culture. The witch demonstrates the inheritance of paradoxical pasts, traversing numerous ideological memoryscapes. This book is an examination of the ways that the witch has been deployed by feminist activists and writers in their political efforts in the twentieth century, and how this has indelibly affected cultural memories of the witch and the witch trials, and how this plays out in popular culture representations of the symbol through the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Consequently, this book considers the relationship between popular culture and media, activist politics, and cultural memory. Using hauntological theories of memory and temporality, and literary, screen, and cultural studies methodologies, this book considers how popular culture remembers, misremembers, and forgets usable pasts, and the uses (and misuses) of thesememories for feminist politics. Given the ubiquity of the witch in popular culture, politics and activism since 2016, this book is a timely examination of the range of meanings inherent to the figure, and is an important study of how cultural symbols like the witch inherit paradoxical memories, histories, and politics. The book will be valuable for scholars across disciplines, including witchcraft studies, feminist philosophy and history, memory studies, and popular culture studies.
- GenresNonfiction
410 pages, Kindle Edition
Published March 31, 2023
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
February 28, 2025
This is a beautifully written academic text that truly succeeds in its efforts to map the feminist memories and cultural histories of the figure of the witch. A really great and informative read that should not be missed!
July 5, 2024
so interesting!!
December 12, 2025
The amount of material one could draw on for a book on feminist appropriations of the witch in popular culture, memory, and activism is considerable and could probably take up several volumes of academic texts. This much slimmer volume restricts itself to second wave feminism onwards and is arranged mostly thematically, which was probably a smart choice. Even so, the ground covered is almost exclusively North American, and while Kosmina makes the interesting claim the the early modern witch hunts are not as culturally present in Europe than America, it still only gives one side of the picture; the Macedonian-language film You Won’t Be Alone, for instance, would be an interesting comparandum to the closely coeval American films. Popular culture is also problematically equated almost entirely with film, plus a few books (and mostly with a certain set of seven books).
The revelation of this book will not be surprising to those familiar with the topic, but is nonetheless depressing: popular culture and activism have created and perpetuated an idea of witches and witch hunts that bears little resemblance to reality. It is striking how twentieth century feminist writers would just confidently make things up and be outraged, and how tightly these ideas have clung to the cultural imagination (though I found Kosmina’s account of how the myth of 9 million came about inadequate; it was a misinterpretation of the work of a nineteenth century German scholar who estimated the number to encompass people of all genders killed as witches across a thousand year span). I emerged from the book wishing that, for as potent and interesting engagement with these myths can be, feminists would finally stop misappropriating the memories of these women and men who were executed for no real reason at all.
Kosmina, however, seems to not know what she thinks. She points out how inaccurate the common narratives are, and how witch feminism is closely associated with pernicious movements and people like TERFs, but ends the book with the “we are the daughters of the witches you couldn’t burn” meme that she had previously criticized. Perhaps the most revealing statement was the non-academic aside that calling a witch an abortionist is the highest honor someone like her writing in 2023 could bestow, which reveals nothing more than Kosmina’s priorities as a twenty-first century American, untethered even to the view of persecuted women folk healers that it emerges from. Kosmina also shows a strange reluctance in some sections to criticize countries in the Global South, even those that, by her own account, continue to kill “witches” in the modern day; the reader is, however, treated to a mini-paragraph about how those awful colonialists called traditional practices witchcraft hundreds of years ago.
Overall, a study with some interesting interpretations, but there are better studies out there.
The revelation of this book will not be surprising to those familiar with the topic, but is nonetheless depressing: popular culture and activism have created and perpetuated an idea of witches and witch hunts that bears little resemblance to reality. It is striking how twentieth century feminist writers would just confidently make things up and be outraged, and how tightly these ideas have clung to the cultural imagination (though I found Kosmina’s account of how the myth of 9 million came about inadequate; it was a misinterpretation of the work of a nineteenth century German scholar who estimated the number to encompass people of all genders killed as witches across a thousand year span). I emerged from the book wishing that, for as potent and interesting engagement with these myths can be, feminists would finally stop misappropriating the memories of these women and men who were executed for no real reason at all.
Kosmina, however, seems to not know what she thinks. She points out how inaccurate the common narratives are, and how witch feminism is closely associated with pernicious movements and people like TERFs, but ends the book with the “we are the daughters of the witches you couldn’t burn” meme that she had previously criticized. Perhaps the most revealing statement was the non-academic aside that calling a witch an abortionist is the highest honor someone like her writing in 2023 could bestow, which reveals nothing more than Kosmina’s priorities as a twenty-first century American, untethered even to the view of persecuted women folk healers that it emerges from. Kosmina also shows a strange reluctance in some sections to criticize countries in the Global South, even those that, by her own account, continue to kill “witches” in the modern day; the reader is, however, treated to a mini-paragraph about how those awful colonialists called traditional practices witchcraft hundreds of years ago.
Overall, a study with some interesting interpretations, but there are better studies out there.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews