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and the United Kingdom, the girl witch in contemporary popular culture
texts signifies Capital-F Feminism—or, to be more precise, Capital-I
Capital-F Intersectional Feminism. Given the usefulness of each different
term for this contemporary feminist moment—popular feminism, post-
postfeminism, and emergent feminisms—and to capture the particular
type of aspirational prestige that these popular culture texts treat this
nascent model of feminist politics with, I have referred to it here as ‘cool’
feminism, following Jessalynn Keller and Jessica Ringrose’s use of the
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term, and Jessica Valenti’s oft-cited Guardian article about the ‘coolness’
of feminism in contemporary media.55
Feminist politics in these texts not only signify liberation and revolu-
tion, but are also aspirational and imbue the witch with cultural prestige,
cachet, and importantly, power: witchcraft (and consequently feminism)
signifies as ‘coolness’ in these texts. This is what marks this particular era
of feminist media culture and cool feminism. These texts operate on a
logic of empowerment, where witchcraft offers power and agency, but
without specific direction towards what liberation actually looks like: to
use Banet-Weiser’s description of popular feminism, “empowerment is
the central logic; with little to no specification as to what we want to
empower women to do.”56 These most recent depictions of girl witches
demonstrate this particular sensibility: feminism matters a great deal in
these texts, arguably more so than in any era since the 1970s, and the
girl witch becomes a vector through which feminist politics and empow-
erment are understood and deployed. However, the visibility of the girl
witch’s feminist politics often becomes the only goal: being a feminist is
about being seen as a feminist, and not about the ongoing and persistent
acts of labour that activism requires. Nevertheless, there is still something
politically generative in these cool feminist texts: the mediation of feminist
memories offers an activist potential, if not an actuality.
Netflix’s The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina (2018–2020) demon-
strates this particular deployment of the witch, girlhood, and feminist
memory in popular culture. It is a show that is defined by its political
earnestness and sincere, but very unsubtle, invocation of feminism. It
is incredibly explicit in its feminist politics, representing the girl witch
as a thoughtful and wholly committed feminist activist who uses her
magic as another tool in her feminist killjoy survival kit, to use Sara
Ahmed’s term.57 Being feminist—specifically, calling yourself an intersec-
Copyright 2023. Palgrave Macmillan.

tional feminist—is what constitutes “cool” in Sabrina. The girl witches

in Sabrina quite consciously discuss their feminism, and how their

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witchcraft signifies their political beliefs and enables their activist practices.
(For example, Sabrina and her friends start the Women’s Intersectional
Creative and Cultural Association at their local high school: W.I.C.C.A.,
as they repeatedly call it, to drive home the association between femi-
nism and memories of the witch.58 ) Sabrina does demonstrate some
of the features of postfeminism as outlined by Gill and McRobbie (for
example, it demonstrates makeover and beauty paradigms, and a repeated
emphasis on individualist narratives of choice). However, it ultimately
mediates emerging feminist politics that are more sincere and radical.59
From the spectral return of the Salem witch hunts in the first season to
the resurrection of Lilith and her eventual crowning as the new Queen of
Hell, the series is concerned with the overhaul and dissolution of existing
paradigms—even within the hierarchy of Hell—and girl witches are the
figures through whom this dissolution of the present is figured.
Sabrina cannot by any standard be described as subtle about its femi-
nist politics, with the girl witches constantly fighting against the “puri-
tanical masculinity”60 of contemporary American culture (both mortal
and witchy). Whether Sabrina is protesting her mortal high school prin-
cipal’s banning of feminist books like Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye,61
using her magic to prank transphobic footballers who have been bullying
her friend, Theo,62 or trying to remove the misogynistic priest of her
coven, Father Blackwood, and install a more feminist Church regime63
the show is consistent in its correlation of girl witches and feminist poli-
tics. Sabrina is afforded power and agency through her witchcraft, but,
unlike other postfeminist texts about girl witches, it is not a power that
allows her to grow out of girlhood. In fact, it is a power that exists
because of her girlhood. Consequently, like the series’ (quite blatant)
attempts to engage with feminist history, politics, and values, it is also
very concerned with the language of girlhood, particularly in the first
season. Girlhood is imbued with a sense of future potential and of gener-
ative politics, and it is the politics of girlhood in Sabrina that marks
the ‘cool feminism’ of the show as different from earlier postfeminist
girl power. To quote Megan Henesy, Sabrina “takes the teen-witch as a
metaphor for female maturation and empowerment to a new level, explic-
itly exploring the role of a politically aware teenage witch in an uncanny
America that is at once present day and eerily ‘out-of-time’.”64 Sabrina’s
choice in Part One between becoming a full witch or remaining mortal
is presented as a part of a coming-of-age narrative that marks witchcraft
as something after girlhood (or childhood for her non-female cousins

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 230 B. KOSMINA

and friends). When Sabrina chooses Sabrina Edwina Diana Spellman as

her Dark Baptismal name (to honour her deceased parents, Edward and
Diana), Sabrina’s aunt Hilda says “[t]hey [Sabrina’s parents] would be so
proud of the young woman you’ve become,” to which her other aunt,
Zelda, says “[c]orrection, Hilda, they’d be so proud of the young witch
she is becoming.”65 Witchcraft, much like girlhood, is seen as a process
of becoming, and is a separate stage of development to girlhood: young
people become witches.
Sabrina, trying to explain to her mortal boyfriend, Harvey, about what
will happen at her Dark Baptism, says that:

Sabrina: This place [the woods they stand in], it’s where I was born,
Harvey. Not in Greendale General. Here. In this grove of
trees. Almost sixteen years ago. It’s also where I’ll be reborn
this Friday night. On my sixteenth birthday, at the stroke of
midnight, under an eclipsing blood moon.
Harvey: I don’t understand. Reborn how?
Sabrina: The ceremony’s called a Dark Baptism, but it’s not as bad
as it sounds. It’s kind of like when we went to Shoshanna
Feldman’s bat mitzvah. Or Guadalupe Lopez’s quinceañera.
I’m leaving my… girlhood behind.
Harvey: [chuckles] In the woods? Is that a metaphor?66

Sabrina’s Dark Baptism functions as a social ritual that metaphorically

divides identities of child and adult, and girl and witch. (The similarity
between the Shoshanna Feldman whose bat mitzvah Sabrina and Harvey
attended and Shoshana Felman, eminent literary studies professor, does
not seem incidental. Sabrina is littered with these kinds of references
that I am hesitant to quite call intertexts but operate similarly. Rarely
do these references to cultural, historical, or media texts/objects offer
much meaning beyond being a signifier in and of themselves (a kind of
‘hey, look, this exists in the real world, now moving on’ callout). This
is arguably part of the overall ‘cool feminist’ project of the show—it
references feminism (in this case, a feminist scholar) to render it visible,
but does not then go on to engage in any great deal with the politics
underlying the reference: the visibility is the only point.)
However, Sabrina disrupts prevailing postfeminist narratives of the
divide between girlhood and witchhood. In a conversation between
Sabrina and the Weird Sisters prior to her Dark Baptism, Sabrina expresses

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 7 WITCHES AS GIRLS 231

her desire to have both the freedom of the permanent space of unbe-
coming of girlhood, and the power of the witch, something that appears
precluded from Hermione and Willow:

Sabrina: […] it still feels wrong to me. Signing my name in the

Book of the Beast. Knowing that, on some level, I… I’m
giving up my freedom.
Prudence: You are. In exchange for power. An even exchange.
Sabrina: But I want both. I want freedom and power.
Prudence: [laughs] He’ll never give you that. The Dark Lord. The
thought of you, of any of us, having both terrifies him.
Sabrina: Why is that?
Prudence: He’s a man, isn’t He?67

This oppositional logic between freedom and power and the consequent
choice that girl witches face is positioned within the logic of the show
as a condition of patriarchy (and, for the feminist audience, of postfemi-
nism), and one that must be challenged. That Sabrina questions it when
other witches (who have already had their Dark Baptisms) do not further
marks her out as unusual in some sense, and contributes to Sabrina’s own
cultural prestige: her ‘cool feminism’ drives the series’ narrative. Sabrina’s
questioning of patriarchal power structures and systems such as Lucifer’s
oppression over witches is the central narrative arc of Parts One and Two,
and indicates how the series as a whole is invested in circulating, dissem-
inating, and deploying feminist politics. In her desire for both freedom
and power, Sabrina also rejects postfeminist, neoliberal considerations
of power, and chooses not to sign the Book of the Beast at her Dark
Baptism. Running from the woods and pursued by the coven who try to
force her to sign, she cries “[t]here is another path for me, just as there
was for my [warlock] father and [mortal] mother. A third way. And even
if there isn’t, my name is Sabrina Spellman, and I will not sign it away!”.68
This reflects how Sabrina mediates memories of postfeminist politics
through her position as a girl. Sabrina’s refusal to choose between girl-
hood and witchhood demonstrates how the television series as a whole
mediates contemporary ‘cool feminist’ politics: the “liminality” of girl-
hood functions “as a means of resistance.”69 Sabrina’s refusal to engage
in a neoliberal system of illusory ‘choice’ signifies how the show does
engage in a more substantive structural critique than earlier postfeminist
media tends to. As Sabrina says in voiceover at the end of the second

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 232 B. KOSMINA

episode, “the girl who had to decide between being a witch and being
mortal chose neither path. Or, if you look at it another way, chose both.
She was half-witch, but with two covens.”70 Sabrina demonstrates how
the mediation of feminist memory via the girl witch in popular media
offers an anticipatory hope for the future, and privileges feminist politics
with a degree of cultural cachet that is emblematic of contemporary cool
feminist politics.

Girls and the Future

The texts considered in this chapter all fall into the spectrum of young
adult literature (some on the younger end, some on the more adult end,
but all in some way designed for the broad category of teenagers and
young adults). This is not so much a choice as a necessity: texts that
engage in a substantive discussion of the capacities and powers of girl-
hood most frequently are texts written for girls.71 If contemporary media
and culture is marked by a political sensibility where feminism once again
matters but where it operates on a circular logic where ‘mattering’ is
defined by visibility, postfeminist girl power texts for young adults offer
a particularly useful example of the type of media produced in this ideo-
logical moment. ‘Cool feminism’ does seem to demonstrate all of the
features of postfeminism, where feminist values are affirmed and incorpo-
rated into mainstream neoliberal capitalism—but these political values are
not repudiated, pushed away, viewed as complete or offered any other act
of closure. Feminism is marked as urgent, radical, intersectional, impor-
tant, and as an essential part of the girl witch identity in contemporary
cool feminist texts. As naïve as this may sound (and I have no doubt
that history will ultimately make a fool of me when the rampant popular
misogyny72 that characterizes contemporary politics starts to show up
with more prominence in popular culture), this seems a promising turn
for feminist media scholars. Yes, there is still a commodification of feminist
politics occurring, and yes, feminist politics that do not divorce them-
selves from neoliberal racial capitalism are not radical: but that girl witches
are specifically calling themselves feminists indicates something different to
earlier postfeminist girl power politics where ‘feminism’ is only spoken in
disgust.
What this demonstrates is how the figure of the girl witch mediates
contemporary debates about feminist politics in media culture, arguably
more explicitly than other witch figures (and, as seen throughout this

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 7 WITCHES AS GIRLS 233

monograph, the relationship between witchcraft and feminism has been

uncontested for decades in Anglo-American feminist politics, and so the
unsubtlety of postfeminist politics in girl witches is particularly notable).
These teen witches demonstrate a concerted and explicit feminist rhetoric
in their characterization, narrative arcs, and even at the granular level
of dialogue and physical appearance. Hermione Granger consistently
demonstrates her activist and intellectual excellence, and refuses unfair
treatment because she is a girl; however, the reproductive futurity of
these texts ultimately suggests that girl witches, even when they seem
to invoke the memory of feminist politics, can obscure the radical poten-
tial of future politics. For Willow Rosenberg, witchcraft offers a means
of empowerment, liberation, and community building. Buffy is in the
unique position to show how the girl witch transitions to womanhood
when operating in a postfeminist media landscape. Witchcraft becomes
a part of the process of unbecoming that signifies girlhood in postfem-
inism: the girl witch is always already becoming a woman, collapsing
narratives of historical trauma and metaphorical growing-up into the
subjectivity of a young woman. Sabrina Spellman—who remains forever a
girl having sacrificed herself at the end of Part Four to save the world—
views becoming a witch with ambivalence, as it appears to be a choice
between freedom (mortality) and power (witchcraft). However, the post-
postfeminist or cool feminist politics of contemporary girl witches instead
makes the falsity of this choice apparent, to both Sabrina and to the audi-
ence. Sabrina’s refusal to engage in this demonstrates how popular culture
representations of girl witches mediate contemporary feminist memo-
ryscapes, and, maybe, what the future of feminist politics looks like, no
matter what label it is given.

Notes
1. Philippe Ariés, Centuries of Childhood (Middlesex, UK: Penguin Books,
1960), 45.
2. James R. Kincaid, Child-Loving: The Erotic Child and Victorian Culture
(London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 11.
3. Henry Jenkins, “Introduction: Childhood Innocence and Other Modern
Myths,” in The Children’s Culture Reader, ed. Henry Jenkins (New York
and London: New York University Press, 1998), 5.
4. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity
(1990, reis., New York and London: Routledge, 1990; 2006), 45; Simone

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 234 B. KOSMINA

de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-
Chevallier (1949, reis., London, Vintage Books, 2011), 293.
5. Beauvoir, Second Sex, 305.
6. Catherine Driscoll, Girls: Feminine Adolescence in Popular Culture and
Cultural Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 127–128.
7. Driscoll, Girls, 128.
8. See Angela McRobbie, Feminism and Youth Culture, 2nd ed. (Hampshire
and London: Macmillan Press, 2000), 12; Valerie Walkerdine, Daddy’s
Girl: Young Girls and Popular Culture (London: Macmillan, 1997), 2.
9. Driscoll, Girls, 133.
10. Jennifer Helgren and Colleen A. Vasconcellos, “Introduction,” in Girl-
hood: A Global History, ed. Jennifer Helgren and Colleen A. Vasconcellos
(New Brunswick, USA and London: Rutgers University Press, 2010), 4.
11. Catherine Driscoll, “Girls Today: Girl Culture and Girl Studies,” Girlhood
Studies 1, no. 1 (Summer 2008): 14.
12. Driscoll, Girls, 5.
13. Quoted in Emilie Zaslow, Feminism, Inc: Coming of Age in Girl Power
Media Culture (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 3.
14. Zaslow, Feminism Inc, 4.
15. Rosalind Gill, “Postfeminist Media Culture: Elements of a Sensibility,”
European Journal of Cultural Studies 10, no. 2 (2007): 149; Marnina
Gonick, Emma Renold, Jessica Ringrose, and Lisa Weems, “Rethinking
Agency and Resistance: What Comes After Girl Power?” Girlhood Studies
2, no. 2 (Winter 2009), 1–3.
16. In fact, Miranda Corcoran’s recently published work (too recent to be
able to discuss at length here) Witchcraft and Adolescence in American
Popular Culture (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2022) does exactly
this, considering the emergence of the teen witch as a cultural force
throughout the twentieth century.
17. Rachel Moseley, “Glamorous Witchcraft: Gender and Magic in Teen Film
and Television,” Screen 43, no. 4 (Winter 2002): 403.
18. Angela McRobbie, The Aftermath of Feminism: Gender, Culture, and
Social Change (London: Sage Publications, 2009), 12.
19. MCRobbie Aftermath of Feminism, 11.
20. Gill, “Postfeminist Media Culture,” 149. Both Gill and McRobbie char-
acterize postfeminism as the ‘entanglement’ of contradictory feminist and
anti-feminist discourses. However, I am also cautious of an overly prescrip-
tive definition of postfeminist sensibilities. As Margaret Henderson and
Anthea Taylor point out, Gill’s outline of the elements of features of
postfeminist media culture (which includes specific trends, tropes, and
narratives) has become so accepted that there is a tendency for femi-
nist scholars to treat critique of postfeminist media as a ‘box-ticking’

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