Nerdist
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28th October 2021
Why the Witch Calls to the Queer Audience
In today’s pop culture world, there is an incredible push to tell more queer stories. But despite these efforts, finding narratives that speak to diverse groups remains a work in progress. We still see things like “first-ever gay character” (for the five-hundredth time) and characters that allow platforms to talk the talk but not exactly walk the walk. And if the walk does happen, the vision of a queer person filters through a normative lens. Instead of a story that speaks to the represented group, a find and replace occurs.
The same story that’s always told simply gets told again, but now under the guise of representation. But the question remains, to whom are those stories appealing? In truth, no one. The normative populations that might reject queer stories reject the stories anyway. The queer populations who look for representation feel glad for the attempt but often find the stories lacking in the end.
Sometimes, though, representative stories get told without true awareness of that representation. This is the case with the generally popular witch figure. Though there are surprisingly few queer witches in pop culture, the narrative of the witch is, almost definitionally, a queer one.