Folk Survivals, Spurned Witches, and Thwarted Inheritance, or, What Makes the Occult Queer?

Abstract

Over the past few years there has been an explosion in popularity of so-called ‘occult’ practices like astrology and tarot, particularly among left-leaning people who tend to politicize their investments as forms of counterhegemony. In ethnographic fieldwork among queer occultists in Montreal, I explore how practitioners imagine themselves to be divesting from legacies of violence, opting instead for apparently queer genealogies of knowledge that are known in terms of the ways they have been repressed. Framing the occult as a historiographic mode, this article lays bare how certain knowledge practices emerged as the disciplinary excess of the regulatory ideal of modernity, and how this putative opposition offers an appealing location for social critique. Turning to literature on Victorian scientific cultures, I show how the occult becomes legible as always already about epistemic crisis and the struggle between sanctioned methods of inquiry. Put in conversation with queer temporality scholarship, this crisis may offer an allegory for queer historical encounter that explains its appeal among queer people, wherein the rubric of legitimacy or ‘truth’ is apprehended as an effect of power. The pervasive claim among my informants that queer people are ‘naturally’ drawn to the occult, and the emphasis on finding alternative routes/roots in order to disrupt heteronormativity, white supremacy, and patriarchy locates this phenomenon within cultural conversations about historical repair, and the extent to which we can divest from what we inherit in favour of something else.