The Witches’ Road: Representations of Queer Spirituality in Agatha All Along

Abstract

In this paper I encounter Agatha and her coven in, Agatha All Along, through a critical lens that has religious mythologies and queer/lesbian spirituality in focus. Here we navigate the queer feminist representations of characters in Agatha all Along as these interweave with neopagan spiritualities and at the same time resist patriarchal ideologies regarding gender and sexuality that have been shaped by forces within Christianity (such as those surfacing in contemporary evangelical Christian politics). The Witches’ Road is thus imagined here as a counter-story—a rereading of Eve in the Garden of Eden, where she, this time, makes a series of ritual escapes from the heteronormative and oppressive legislature of Christo-patriarchy. Brought along in the telling is the historic denigration of the Witch in Christianity, in relation to current denigrations of powerful women and the queer community in politics. In this kind of re-inscription—as—resistance we draw inspiration from Hélène Cixous’s “Laugh of the Medusa,” and Illa, that offers a feminist method of rereading and reinscribing narratives that have oppressed and caricatured women. What is offered in place, is the possibility of tracing the shadow-woman that lies beneath the religious text, that surfaces tangibly in the mythology of Agatha All Along. I journey with Cixous towards the possibility of a rewriting/rereading the narrative of this woman, tracing Eve and Agatha’s escape from patriarchal dystopias of past and present.