Queer occult: How Queer People in Montréal “Reclaim” Practices of Astrology, Tarot, and Magic to Divest from Legacies of Settler Colonialism, Whiteness, and Imperial Modernity
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. 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’. \n \nIn 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. Drawing from work across history of science, critical race theory, queer studies, and affect theory, I theorize the occult as an historiographic mode, always already about epistemic crisis and the struggle between sanctioned methods of inquiry. I theorize 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. What's more, I depart from debates over cultural appropriation to develop a theory of the occult as a biopolitical affect regime, wherein the development of sensitivity is linked to social healing and progress. I locate the contemporary phenomenon of queer occultism within a broader conversation on inheritance, historical repair, and divestment from empire, wherein participants confront the possibility of connecting to the "elsewhere" of imperial modernity. How does the occult represent an attempt to build a capacity for that connection, and how do participants reflect on this capacity as key to healing from white supremacy, capitalism, and colonialism?
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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 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.036 | 0.032 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 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".