U of Melbourne Speaker Casts ‘Spell’ on All-Male Conference Panels

An event at the University of Melbourne in Melbourne, Australia, last week featured a guest speaker who came to cast a “spell to bind all male conference panels.”

An advertisement for an August 27 event at the University of Melbourne featured a performance artist who was hired to use “technopaganism” to cast a “spell” on all-male speaking panel events.

Combining traditional magical elements with technopaganism, the performance, or live casting, enacts an embodied form of knowledge production, and protection from (cis)masculine futurity. The following discussion will contextualise the performance via an articulation of contemporary queer art and writing practices, drawing on Stupart’s research into magic, fiction, and abjection.

The performance artist, Dr. Linda Stupart, is dressed like a clown in an advertisement for the event. The ad goes on to say that Stupart will address issues of masculinity during the “performance.”

Nice to see the rigorous scholarship @unimelb

cc @RealPeerReview https://t.co/sAdedQJLKz pic.twitter.com/PWLQLZ1fDU

— Claire Lehmann (@clairlemon) September 4, 2018

Stupart’s personal website includes some bizarre writings about men. “As you sew the tongue closed say: I tie your tongues, your all male ones, from reproducing only masculine knowledge as truth,” one poem reads.

In December 2017, Breitbart News published a humorous piece about a group of self-proclaimed “witches” who were planning to put a “hex” on President Trump. “Days after Donald Trump won the U.S. election, videos of women ‘hexing’ Trump went viral around the world, encouraging budding magical practitioners to burn images of the president-elect to bring his works to ruin,” a feminist journal wrote about the trend. “Meanwhile, an entire explosive industry of witch-paraphernalia is boiling out of the cauldron of digital consumer culture.”