Popular Witchcraft Vs. Trumpism

In February, the singer Lana Del Rey tweeted a call for the performance of a binding spell to “obstruct Donald Trump from harm-doing”. Outlining instructions for a spell using candles and tarot cards, she asked for a worldwide act of witchcraft to counteract misogyny.

In this essay for MTV.com, Meaghan Garvey asks whether there’s a new feminism emerging from this and other recent references to witchcraft in pop culture.

Garvey begins with Del Rey and takes a meandering course through various forms of cultural expression from past and present, such as last year’s cult-classic-in-the-making movie called The Love Witch, directed by LA filmmaker Anna Biller. She also refers to Laura Mulvey’s landmark essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” from 1975, and Chris Kraus’ cult-classic-book-turned-mainstream-TV-show I Love Dick (though the relevance of the latter to her argument is hard to fully comprehend; maybe it's that (oc)cult classics always possess some magical element). What I read is a historical trajectory of female artists harnessing occult symbolism to reverse, or at least complicate, the male gaze.

For fans of Silvia Federici’s essential feminist reader The Caliban and the Witch (1998), a contemporary return to witchery is a logical political maneuver—whether or not its employment has anything to do with an earnest belief in the power of spells and tarot cards. While Garvey could certainly have focused her argument more clearly on the feminist history of witchcraft beyond an aestheticization of occultism, she draws in a convincing set of references here from which I hope much more magical feminist activism emerges.

Post script: For those surprised to find interesting long-form journalism on MTV.com, I can only say: have you seen Teen Vogue lately?