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Another difficult and risky move this chapter makes-but an important one at this moment of public reckoning with the pervasive realities of patriarchal sexism in every stratum of our own culture-is to work out where, how, and whether sexual violence and erotic desire should ever be considered on the same map, as part of the same affective system. One effect of queering the witch hunt is to connect the history of what has been done to women with the history of what has been done to homosexuals and other deviant-desiring actors, illuminating deep historical consonances between the affective contours of misogyny and homophobia. In turning a queer lens on the literature of the witch hunt, I am focusing here on what happens to sexed, gendered, and classed bodies-how they’re rendered monstrous, other, and inhuman, and how they’re crushed in the machinery of a paranoid patriarchal order that projects its own worst content onto them. Instead, the remainder of the book confronts queer erotic dynamics that work in and through the apparatuses of patriarchal and colonial power. This chapter and the final one deal with systems of desire that refuse any presumptive association of happy or liberatory outcomes with queerness. Here, at its half-way point, this book moves away from a study of the multifarious queer forms and fancies of desire in comic plots, into a discussion of negative affects that take queer shapes.
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And as an erotic form, it is wholly perverse in that its conventional climax is a death. The witch hunt is a collective striving whose end is not a release of energy from bodies, as in a sexual consummation, but instead an impacting of built-up social energies onto the body of the accused. They are, like sex acts, a culturally convention-bound and goal-directed set of physical and verbal procedures, collectively performed and powered by an idiosyncratic, invisible complex of investments on the part of each participant, culminating in a scripted climax the basic form of which is foreknown, though the details vary with each iteration.
HOW TO GET THE CROOKED NAILS IN WITCH IT TRIAL
1 I am starting from the premise that the witch hunt and witch trial process are erotic activities. Plays and pamphlets about witch trials constitute a distinct genre, witch hunt literature, which follows a conventional plot trajectory of suspicion, accusation, investigation, discovery, and ultimately confession and execution. This chapter considers two widely publicized witch hunts in Scotland and England through their popular literature: a news pamphlet about the North Berwick witch hunt, Newes from Scotland (1591), and The Witch of Edmonton (1622), a fictionalized domestic tragedy by John Ford, Thomas Dekker, and William Rowley, based on the trial and execution of a real woman, Elizabeth Sawyer, in 1621. The affectively supercharged cycle by which this occurs is projective and attributive: it constructs queerness in another, and by the paranoid logic of implication, it reveals its own secret investments.
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In short, the production-through-demonization of the witch has a particularly queer shape. This chapter analyzes the mechanism that produces a witch-the output, so to speak, of the witch trial scene: a figure characterized by her deviant desires and sexual secrets, depraved acts, and dangerous agenda. How is a witch made? Through the process enacted in the witch trial, a scene into which tens of thousands of people throughout Europe, mostly women, were ensnared between the late sixteenth and late seventeenth centuries. Abigail Williams, The Crucible (Arthur Miller, 1953)