The Queer and Feminist Worlds of Witches & Magical Beings in Feminist YA Graphic Novels

Abstract

The figure of the witch currently offers a compelling manifestation of the desires and anxieties of our social moment particularly around gender, equity, and misogyny. With this current reemergence of the witch figure in popular culture, this paper looks at the presence of witchy worlds full of magical beings in feminist YA graphic novels. It argues these graphic novels offer an important imaginative space for exploring and celebrating feminist queerness as a form of community and kinship that counters dominant heteronormative ways of being in the world. In particular the paper is interested in how the witchy and magical lifeworlds of books like Witch Boy (2017-2019) and Lumberjanes (2014-2020) provide a site for queerness and an intersectional feminist politics to exist for a younger audience. This paper will discuss in detail how these works collectively imbue their narratives with inter-generational dialogues around notions of identity, agency, and, legacy that map onto non-diegetic realities happening in our current culture around feminism, anti-racist, anti-colonial, and trans-inclusive activisms. In this way the paper reads this sub-set genre of feminist and queer YA fantasy as part of a larger cultural revisiting of the figure of the witch that has become so central to various forms of activisms and resistance both online and offline within the realm of young adult fantasy fiction.