Dr. Isabel Machado has contributed a chapter to The Witch Studies Reader (Duke University Press). The collection is edited by Soma Chaudhuri and Jane Ward and will be published in Spring 2025. The publisher is offering a 30% savings on preorders at their website. Use the code E25WTSTR.
Mista Boo: Portrait of a Drag Witch
Dr. Machado’s chapter “Mista Boo: Portrait of a Drag Witch” presents a portrait of the drag queen and witch Alejandro Garza (aka Mista Boo) that blurs the line between character and performer in three acts, inspired by the faces of the Neo-Pagan Triple Goddess—maiden, mother, crone. Drawing on oral history interviews conducted with the artist, it uses Mista Boo’s story to illustrate the relationship between queerness, art, witchcraft and marginalization and community building within LGBTQIA+ communities.
Visit Mista Boo’s Instagram page.
About the Book
Stories about witches are by their nature stories about the most basic and profound of human experiences—healing, sex, violence, tragedies, aging, death, and encountering the mystery and magic of the unknown. It is no surprise, then, that witches loom large in our cultural imaginations. In academia, studies of witches rarely emerge from scholars who are themselves witches and/or embedded in communities of witchcraft practitioners. The Witch Studies Reader brings together a diverse group of scholars, practitioners, and scholar-practitioners who examine witchcraft from a critical decolonial feminist perspective that decenters Europe and departs from exoticizing and pathologizing writing on witchcraft in the global South. The authors show how witches are keepers of suppressed knowledges, builders of new futures, exemplars of praxis, and theorists in their own right. Throughout, they account for the vastly different national, political-economic, and cultural contexts in which “the witch” is currently being claimed and repudiated. Offering a pathbreaking transnational feminist examination of witches and witchcraft that upends white supremacist, colonial, patriarchal knowledge regimes, this volume brings into being the interdisciplinary field of feminist witch studies. Soma Chaudhuri and Jane Ward, editors.
