Saints, Seers, and Sorceresses: Femininity and the Spiritual Supernatural in Contemporary U.S. Film and Television.

Abstract

Saint, Seers, and Sorceresses examines the ways that contemporary discourses of gender and religion/spirituality are shaped, reproduced, and disrupted in popular cultural texts. In the past two decades the cultural landscape of the United States was marked by a florescence of popular film and television texts featuring women and the nexus of religion/spirituality and the supernatural or what I call the “spiritual supernatural”.

Through close readings of these texts, I argue that the spiritual supernatural operates as a significant and multi-faceted discourse of femininity at the turn of the 21st century. In each chapter I trace the spiritual supernatural’s operation first as a discourse of femininity which responds to contemporary anxieties about femininity in particular as well the broader cultural context in which they first appear. Secondly, I attend to the mythological precedents for these narratives that are invoked and their relationships to contemporary and historical shifts in spiritual life and regimes of truth (which, of course, are not wholly separate from gender anxieties).

This analysis is significant because feminist media studies’ failure to engage with these narratives, or to do so while dismissing their connections to religion and spirituality is a significant gap in recent work on the ways that certain elements of feminism and feminist thinking have been incorporated into popular media in such a way as to render feminism unnecessary and even contrary to women’s well-being. These texts are certainly engaged in the work of containing the threat that feminist ideas pose to the status quo, but which ideas and the methods of containment are different and practically undiscussed in the extant literature. Studies of religion and the media from a media and cultural studies perspective are similarly missing any monographs which attend to the heavily gendered nature of the recent turn towards spirituality in popular film and television.