Queer occultism, sentimental biopower, and becoming ‘bottoms’ as a means to divest from white supremacy among practitioners of magic in Montréal
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Astrology, magic, and other psychic healing practices are undergoing a cultural revival, notably among those on the Left who employ it as a language for social justice. Queer practitioners have claimed kinship with the occult through a perceived shared abjection, deeming it an inherently queer resource for self- and community empowerment, and naming anti-racism and decolonization key aims of their work. At the same time, these forms of occultism draw suspicion, not least among practitioners themselves, who are critical of the ways these knowledge traditions have been complicit in 'spiritual genocide'. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork with 30 informants in Montréal in 2022, I investigate the occult's appeal among queer people as a process of affective expansion, wherein practitioners attune to heretofore repressed lifeways, knowledges and worlds that machineries of empire have rendered invisible. If contemporary occult movements represent a turning towards putatively repressed modalities that may rival those which we have otherwise inherited, queer informants claim a special relationship to these objects through a framework of sensitivity that magic allows them to workshop. Theorizing the occult as a biopolitical affect regime, I argue that informants ironically invest in historically racialized language of impressibility as indexes of social health at the same time that they locate queerness, rather than whiteness, as a conduit for that affective expansion. I argue that white informants demonstrate a particular anxiety about how to learn to become open to this otherwise, positing 'bottoming' as a spiritual and political imperative to become receptive to forms of accountability, reparations and solidarity. How does the occult represent an attempt to build capacity for receptivity among participants, and how do they link this capacity to the healing of white supremacy and decolonization?
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.020 | 0.023 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".