In the first few seasons of the show Buffy the Vampire
Slayer, Willow Rosenberg started off as a bookish overachiever, who often plays
second fiddle to the brash main character of Buffy. Over time as her character
developed, she started to learn witchcraft and magic, coinciding to when she
went to college and started exploring her sexuality. Eventually, she meets another
witch that eventually becomes her girlfriend (Tara), and together they learn
more about magic. The kind of magic that they explore is usually helpful and
benevolent to the main group of friends. It’s easy to see the contemporary parallels
between exploring more of your identity and exploring a new interest, but there’s also
another element of irony because historically, witchcraft was associated with
deviant women, especially those who were gay. Instead of the show steering away
from this, it decided to embrace this stereotype wholeheartedly and paint it in
a more positive light.
However, this isn’t to say that the show uses the trope of
witches to be completely benign. In the latter seasons of the show, Willow
starts to become addicted to the power that magic grants her, often using it to
change memories and using it in more violent ways. She displays many symptoms
of the addict in “needing to get another fix.” Meanwhile, Tara, who strongly
disagrees with Willow, says that she thinks this behavior is unhealthy, and she actually breaks up with her due to her violent nature. So while this
contemporary use of the trope of the witch isn’t used to demonize specifically
gay women, it is used as a cautionary tale about drugs and substance abuse
instead. This, in a way, is another kind of moral panic, but is considerably
less focused on gender roles and making women submissive.
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