Folk Survivals, Spurned Witches, and Thwarted Inheritance, or, What Makes the Occult Queer?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Over the past few years there has been an explosion in popularity of so-called ‘occult’ practices like astrology and tarot, particularly among left-leaning people who tend to politicize their investments as forms of counterhegemony. In ethnographic fieldwork among queer occultists in Montreal, I explore how practitioners imagine themselves to be divesting from legacies of violence, opting instead for apparently queer genealogies of knowledge that are known in terms of the ways they have been repressed. Framing the occult as a historiographic mode, this article lays bare how certain knowledge practices emerged as the disciplinary excess of the regulatory ideal of modernity, and how this putative opposition offers an appealing location for social critique. Turning to literature on Victorian scientific cultures, I show how the occult becomes legible as always already about epistemic crisis and the struggle between sanctioned methods of inquiry. Put in conversation with queer temporality scholarship, this crisis may offer an allegory for queer historical encounter that explains its appeal among queer people, wherein the rubric of legitimacy or ‘truth’ is apprehended as an effect of power. The pervasive claim among my informants that queer people are ‘naturally’ drawn to the occult, and the emphasis on finding alternative routes/roots in order to disrupt heteronormativity, white supremacy, and patriarchy locates this phenomenon within cultural conversations about historical repair, and the extent to which we can divest from what we inherit in favour of something else.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".