AMANDA JO HOBSON

5. BEWITCHING BODIES

Sex, Violence, and Magic in Urban Fantasy

“Wouldst thou like to live deliciously,” Black Phillip, a devil in the form of a goat, asks burgeoning witch, Thomasin, in Robert Eggers’s brilliantly creepy The Witch: A New England Folktale (2015). The temptation of witchcraft and the seductive powers of the witch incite our imaginations and our sexual impulses. Popular culture tells us that women can be seduced to darkness and that men must beware the seductress, who induces unsuspecting men to give in to their baser sexual needs and be mindful of the siren calling sailors to crash their ships upon the rocks sending them to death in the murky depths of the sea. The messages from mythology to contemporary popular culture are that you must avoid the witch, and if you cannot, she must be destroyed before she wreaks havoc upon you. Yet there is a counter image in popular culture of the witches and wise women of mythology and fairytales represented by characters like Glenda the Good Witch, the Halliwell Sisters, Meredith Gentry, Anita Blake, and Willow Rosenberg, all wielders of magic that have captured our cultural imaginations. Though there have been male magic users, it is the perceived witchcraft of women that has had lasting historical and cultural implications. Historically speaking, Anne Llewellyn Barstow (1994) writes, “Having a female body was the factor most likely to render one vulnerable to being called a witch. The sexual connotations and the explicit sexual violence utilized in many of the trials make this fact clear” (p. 16). With few exceptions, these factors hold firm in urban fantasy engagement with magical beings as well: it is women, their bodies, and their magic that become tools to drive the narrative story arcs of these tales. The witch embodies power and strength just as often as they demonstrate how insecure women’s bodies can be in popular culture and the real world. Throughout fiction, film, and other types of art and media, portrayals of witchcraft and magic play a key role in the construction of our cultural understanding of ourselves. Humans have been enthralled with the icon of the witch often leading to violent manifestations of fear of those perceived as wielders of magic, as evidenced by the European witch hunts and Salem Witch Trials. Our modern fascination with the witch and magic illustrates not only the

© KONINKLIJKE BRILL NV, LEIDEN, 2019 | DOI:10.1163/9789004394100_005 A. J. HOBSON continual allure of witchcraft but also the shift in our perception of the witch in western culture. Because while the witch is still an icon of mystery, she is also an alluring and enduring figure. Urban fantasy fictions rely heavily upon the use of magic as a core driving force of the narrative. In television series, such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Charmed, and The Magicians, and novels by authors, such as Laurell K. Hamilton, Karen Marie Moning, and Deborah Harkness, we see these images of magic practitioners that demonstrate an endless fascination with our (in)ability to control the world. One of the key factors of historical and fictional witch narratives is the prevalence of violence enacted upon the specifically female body and often in undeniably sexualized acts. This chapter will address the constructions of magic and witchcraft, the use of sexuality to fuel magic, and the production of gender within urban fantasy narratives. In examining the intersections of sex, magic, and violence in the urban fantasy, I will pull from historical and fictional accounts and the Wiccan treatise on ritual practice to address the portrayals of magical bodies. The genre of urban fantasy has been steeped in magic since its inception. As discussed in the introduction to this book, urban fantasy is a hybrid genre that grew out of necessity to categorize one series—Laurell K. Hamilton’s Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter Series (1993–present)—that defied conventional genre boundaries. When I discovered Hamilton’s novels in 1997, trying to find copies of those first six novels was like conducting a scavenger hunt through every bookstore. Each individual bookstore shelved the series in different locations, sometimes in science fiction, sometimes in horror, sometimes in mystery, and later, as the series grew more sexual and more based in the relationships of Anita and her men, in romance. But shelving issues aside, the ways Hamilton unraveled the ideas of stable genre constructions allowed her to create complicated narratives that often surprised the reader who relied on the established patterns of genre to predict the narrative.1 When Hamilton began the Merry Gentry series in 2000, she continued her bending and blending of generic practices and built another complex and complicated set of characters and metaphysical constraints. With these two series, Hamilton has continued to shape and redefine the genre and reconceptualize portrayals of the magic wielding woman. Urban fantasy establishes that women can gain real, usable power through their bodies via sexual and non-sexual physical and emotional behaviors or rituals. In the contemporary fictional explorations, supernatural powers can take the form of inherent abilities, salient identity factors, or a combination of both for the wielder. For many paranormal novels, the engagement with magic comes with ingrained codes and practices. The core construction of magic

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