Chronicling the ongoing intersectional struggle to liberate women — inclusively defined as the legacy kind and transgender people — from the Patriarchy™, one microaggression at a time.
On Witchcraft and the Lindsay Clancy Case
We explored recently the mass psychosis that has gripped the consciousness of the American feminist hive-mind vis-à-vis the trial of Lindsay Clancy, who allegedly murdered her three children in the basement of the family home due to postpartum psychosis and, arguably, an astonishing cocktail of 13 psychotropic pharmaceutical drugs, like SSRIs and benzodiazepines, with a host of potentially devastating side effects that the defense posits drove her to temporary insanity and therefore exonerates her from criminal liability.
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This mass psychosis, the addressing of which should probably be a national public health priority, has manifested, among other ways, in the form of unhinged feminist-coded TikTok videos espousing support for Clancy.
In many instances, her feminist supporters have enlisted the aid of the spiritual realm via witchcraft rituals so as to render “justice” for Clancy (meaning that her husband gets the blame, as they believe he is the real killer, despite his alibi).
Feminist witch uploads TikTok video casting a "justice spell" for Lindsay Clancy pic.twitter.com/YLdpYY67uJ
— Benjamin Bartee (@BenBartee) August 21, 2026
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Whereas casting black magic spells on their ex-husbands or their bosses or someone who cut them off in traffic or whomever was once the exclusive domain of lunatic current and future cat ladies with too much time on their hands and probably not enough discipline as children, “feminist witch studies,” as of last year, is a bona fide “interdisciplinary” field of study sanctioned by the state of California.
Professor and Chair of Feminist Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Jane Ward, is its pioneer.
She wrote a whole book about it and witchcraft’s utility in “decolonial resistance.”
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Via The Current (emphasis added):
Witchcraft has been feared, mocked and romanticized — but rarely has it been fully understood as a story of feminist resistance and enduring cultural power. Feminist studies scholar Jane Ward has set out to change that narrative. Her latest book — a collaboration with co-author Soma Chaudhuri — introduces “feminist witch studies,” a new interdisciplinary field that explores the power, persecution and political dimensions of witchcraft across cultures.
Ward, a professor at UC Santa Barbara, first engaged with the subject while preparing a course on the history of witches and witchcraft. Known for her work in sexuality and gender studies — including a first-of-its-kind course called Critical Heterosexuality Studies — Ward noticed a clear difference in how scholars from the Global North and Global South wrote about witches. “In the Global North, witch hunts are treated as relics of the past, largely viewed as events limited to the medieval or early modern periods," she said. "But in the Global South, witch accusations and persecutions are still ongoing today.”…
Ward and Chaudhuri’s book, “The Witch Studies Reader” (Duke University Press, 2025), shifts the focus away from an outsider studying witchcraft as a cultural curiosity and instead amplifies the voices of those who identify as witches themselves, many of whom are living in Latin America, Asia, Africa or Oceania.
A central theme of the book is how witchcraft serves as a powerful form of feminist and decolonial resistance. The book illustrates how practices historically demonized as witchcraft — such as midwifery, herbal medicine and abortion care — have enabled women to exist and operate outside of state and capitalist control.
“Witchcraft is often about existing just outside state control and capitalism,” Ward said. “This makes it critical to understand witchcraft through a feminist lens — not just because women are typically its practitioners, but because of what makes it threatening to established power structures.”…
“We’ve seen people using the concept of the curse, the hex and the spell as ways to push back against gendered violence and oppression,” Ward said, noting how the witch has been adopted as an image of defiance against patriarchal structures.
