Witchcraft, Gender and Queerness in Contemporary British Literature

Abstract

This chapter analyses four contemporary British women authors who focus on the figure of the witch through a Queer Gothic lens. However, before considering these contemporary feminist views of the witch, the author first lays out histories of European witch hunts from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Of particular note, Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger (Dominican inquisitors) penned their treatise on diabolical witchcraft entitled The Malleus Maleficarum or The Witch’s Hammer (1486) which ‘inextricably linked’ witchcraft with the female sex. From this history, the author looks to these contemporary works that speak back to the historical misogynous stereotyping : Jeanette Winterson’s The Daylight Gate (2012) which is a re-imagining of the Lancashire witches; Carol Ann Duffy’s poem, ‘The Lancashire Witches’ (2012); Emma Donoghue’s 1997 collection of fairy tales entitled Kissing the Witch: Old Tales in New Skins; and, Rebecca Tamàs’s collection of poems, Witch (2019). Through these diverse and feminist examples of perspectives on queer witches, the author explores the obvious queer sexual practices as well as the covert trans, pansexual and polyamorous possibilities that underly these re-considerations of the witch.