In Feminist Afterlives of the Witch (2023) I proposed that the figure of the witch had become a synecdoche for feminist politics itself; that she engaged multiple, often contradictory, mnemonic threads of the history of feminist activism from the Global North, and that her capacity to challenge patriarchal culture and history drew from her position at the nexus of multiple modes of narration: fiction, history, myth, and belief. In this provocation, I want to ask whether the witch continues to mobilise feminist and queer activist efforts through her popular culture representations.

Further, and perhaps more pressingly, I want to consider what affective politics contemporary iterations of the witch organise and generate in an era increasingly defined by polycrisis. What structures of feeling are they enmeshed with? How does the witch’s organisation of genre mediate affect in 2026? What do the witch’s entanglements across cultural fields and aesthetic categories make possible (or foreclose on)?

Discussant: Rita Alcaire (CES) | Moderator: Júlia Garraio (CES)


Bio note 

Brydie Kosmina is a Lecturer in the School of Humanities at Tirkangkaku/Adelaide University. Her monograph, Feminist Afterlives of the Witch: Popular Culture, Memory, Activism was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2023. Her research has appeared in The Journal of Popular Culture and Continuum, and is forthcoming in The Cambridge Companion to the Witch (Cambridge University Press) and The Feminist Film Philosophy Reader (Bloomsbury Academic). Brydie’s research considers the intersections of literary and screen studies, memory and cultural studies, feminisms, and environmental humanities.
 

This webinar is part of the UnCoveR webinar series, Gender, Violence, Media and Arts, an activity developed within the research project UnCoveR – Sexual Violence in Portuguese Mediascapes (https://doi.org/10.54499/2022.03964.PTDC).

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