Queer occultism, sentimental biopower, and becoming ‘bottoms’ as a means to divest from white supremacy among practitioners of magic in Montréal

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?