Witchcraft, Storytelling, and Shapeshifting: A Decolonial Feminist Approach to Oppression and Resistance in Jenni Fagan’s Hex (2022)
摘要
This chapter takes a decolonial feminist approach to consider the portrayal of witches in Jenni Fagan’s historical fiction Hex (2022). By employing the method of imbrication as a reading practice that builds on and complicates the legacy of intersectionality, it considers the representation of power, oppression, and resistance through the rewriting into the history of gendered, nonmodern ways of knowing such as healing practices, understandings of time and space, and relationships to nature and the land. It considers the ways in which witchcraft, storytelling, and shapeshifting represent both means of oppression and possibilities for resistance within the novel. By examining how these three central motifs are portrayed in Hex this chapter is concerned with the imbricated characterization of women’s identities as witches, as well as the historic and cultural contexts that force each of the so-called witches to face and resist oppression in the form of gender-based violence.