Double Toil and Gender Trouble? Performativity and Femininity in the Cauldron of Esotericism Research

“Double, double toil and trouble; / Fire burn and cauldron bubble.” Thus chant the three potion-brewing witches ominously in Shakespeare’s Macbeth (4.1.10–38). The witch’s cauldron is a fitting starting point for an exploration of (Western) esotericism, gender, and femininity. Boiling and brewing, poisoning and stewing, have gendered connotations, evoking the labor of house chores—socially coded as feminine—and the historically misogynistic stereotype of the witch that has been subject to feminist reworkings in modern esotericism and Paganism (Hanegraaff, 2002). The witches’ song—and the stirring of a proverbial pot or cauldron—conjures the idea of trouble. Analytically, troubling or causing trouble can mean challenging taken-for-granted categories—surface and core, dominance and subjugation, female and male. The queer associations of the term “trouble” are epitomized by Judith Butler’s paradigmatic work of queer theory, Gender Trouble (1999). The late 1960s witnessed the emergence of women’s studies or women’s history as a distinct academic domain, with feminist scholars bringing attention to the obscuration of women’s historical contributions to culture and society. Over time, this corrective focus on women gave way to analyses of masculinity and femininity as socially constructed. As highlighted by JoanW. Scott (1986), the growing preference for the term “gender” over that of “women’s studies” in academia reflects an understanding that neither women’s nor men’s social experiences happen in isolation. Simone de Beauvoir’s (1987, p. 267) famous declaration that “[o]ne is not born, but rather becomes, a woman” epitomizes the view that what is perceived as feminine and masculine is socially constructed, rather than the outward manifestations of some natural, gendered essence. A distinction between physical sex and social gender allowed feminist scholars to theorize the roles and expectations attached to masculinity and femininity as separate from the supposedly “natural” bodies they were projected onto. From the 1990s on, postmodern and poststructuralist interventions have challenged this division, with scholars of queer theory—a paradigm emerging from the intersection of gender and gay and lesbian studies—highlighting the link between the construction of sex, gender, and sexuality. The term queer is often used to indicate configurations of gender and sexuality that displace het-