Multiversal Ceremony: On Tending Differential Being
摘要
This chapter explores the place of neurodivergence in feminist, queer, abolitionist, and decolonial worldmaking with a focus on the history and reclamation of witchcraft. The first part of the chapter lays out a theoretical framework, organized around the concepts of “tending,” “esoterism,” and “multiverse,” that supports a method of “reading through” witchcraft to subjunctive esoterisms accompanying it. The second section examines the role of “madness” or “hysteria” in feminist accounts of witchcraft by Barbara Ehrenreich and Dierdre English, Silvia Federici, and Kathleen Skott-Myhre, finding in them a “disjunctive” approach that downplays or disavows neurodivergence. The third section dwells with the poetics of JJJJJerome Ellis, whose Aster of Ceremonies offers a non-disjunctive mood for thinking about politics, knowledge, spirituality, and neurodivergence as co-constitutive of a world. The final section uses Ellis’s mood to speculatively make room for thinking about witchcraft’s history and future in a way that is feminist, spiritual, and affirming of neurodivergent worlding.