The post-feminist fantasy of The Love Witch (2016)

tradwives, TERFs and feminist killjoys

Anna Biller’s The Love Witch (2016) toes the line between sincerity and satire. At first glance, The Love Witch interrogates how the internalised male gaze contorts conceptions of love and the self. However, when read against Biller’s own beliefs, the film becomes laden with tradwife (traditional housewife) and TERF (trans-exclusionary radical feminist) rhetoric. Whilst the film was dubbed a biting satire of traditionalist gender roles upon its release, The Love Witch reads today as a post-feminist fantasy that reforms the feminist killjoy.

In recent years, the feminist killjoy has become a part of the cultural lexicon. In her book, The Feminist Killjoy Handbook Sara Ahmed defined the feminist killjoy as a cultural critic who is willing to bring into question what is enjoyable in order to “make room for possibility [and] change” (2023, 88; 2010, 20).¹ They are, in turn, stifled by the concepts of “happiness” and “acceptance” which serve as mechanisms to maintain social order (2023, 97). In her book, Ahmed turns to Simone de Beauvoir and Ann Oaky, who iterated across their work that women’s conditional happiness was either imposed to “seem good” or a “cover term for conservatism” (Ahmed 2023, 98). Thereby, through engaging with past feminist thinkers, Ahmed comes to the conclusion that shielding yourself from unhappiness, does not necessarily lead to happiness (2023, 105). Therefore, the feminist killjoy’s refusal to accept the socially prescribed modes of happiness imposed upon them challenges the marginalization of feminist critique (2023, 99).

In The Love Witch, the character of Trish embodies what Ahmed conceptualized as the feminist killjoy. Trish is the interior decorator of the apartment that the eponymous Love Witch (Elaine) rents, whom she befriends. After the two are first introduced, Trish takes Elaine to a tearoom where the characters are established as direct antitheses. Elaine upholds the belief that men are easy to please “as long as you give them what they want” and that by “giving men sex [you] unlock their love potential”. Trish on the other hand, accuses Elaine of being “brainwashed by the patriarchy” as her entire self-worth revolves around pleasing men and catering to their needs. Even the ‘knight in shining armour’ fantasy that Elaine recounts to Trish whilst it plays out in a dream sequence, is subsequently undercut by Trish who reminds Elaine that “a husband isn’t a prince” and “love isn’t a fairytale”. It is here that the feminist killjoy kills the joy of Elaine’s “fairy princess fantasy”. However, in the final act of the film, Trish invites Elaine back to the teahouse where she admits that she was “naive” and Elaine was right along in believing that “you should give a man his fantasy”. In the following scene, Trish goes to Elaine’s apartment to return her ring from lunch and transforms herself into an uncanny double of Elaine (Stumer 2022, 1211). In a mirrored reflection, Trish applies Elaine’s lipstick, false lashes, wig, and lingerie to embody the “certain type of woman” that Richard wanted, that Trish “could never be”. Therefore, not only is the feminist killjoy reformed in The Love Witch but undergoes a metamorphosis that transforms her into the “male fantasy” she dared question.

When The Love Witch was first released in 2016 it became an instant feminist classic. In this feminist reworking of cinema from the past, Biller not only satirizes the traditional gender roles imposed upon women but reveals this patriarchal bargain to be a ruse. The tragedy at the crux of The Love Witch is that whilst Elaine wholly submits to the normative expectations of femininity and plays her role to perfection, the men in her life don’t play theirs and are instead left emotionally stunted, needy or dead at the hands of her love magic. Despite Elaine’s cruel optimism towards normative ideas of love and romance, she is inevitably unable to fulfil them (Stumer 2022, 1212 & 1217).

However, whilst The Love Witch is regarded as a biting satire by critics and audiences alike, interviews with director Anna Biller reveal otherwise. Despite the film’s classification as a horror comedy, Biller has claimed across interviews that The Love Witch was written as a tragedy. The tragedy of the film being the fact that neither romantic love nor the “ideal” man can exist in a time “where the sexes are more or less social equals” (Stager 2023). Biller has since voiced that, like her protagonist, she longs for an “ideal man…like those classic heroes in classic movies” (Marshall, 2021). Yet, Elaine is unable to find these qualities in a “real” man due to the fact that men have become distinctly more feminized, as the line “he became just like a woman crying over everything” suggests. In a 2016 interview with Culture Trip, Biller buckled down on this belief by distancing herself from what she dubbed the “kind of feminists” who believe that “the only feminism is the one where you take away male pleasure” (Fuller 2016). The post-feminist rhetoric Biller espoused in her interviews supports the reading of Trish (the feminist killjoy) as the mere embodiment of the “kind of feminists” that Biller sees as reactionary. Biller expressed further frustration in a 2017 interview with Film International, regarding the reception of her film as a satire. In the interview, Biller attributed the misinterpretation of her film’s tone to “sexism”, as her “sincere” attempts to write a tragic “magical fairytale” were undermined by critics who thought her fantasy to be ironic (Sorrento 2017). Therefore, with the knowledge that The Love Witch was not intended to be satirical, the feminist killjoy assumes the role of the “villain” in this post-feminist fairytale.

The post-feminist fantasy constructed in The Love Witch repackages feminism as heteronormative and bio-essentialist. Trans-exclusionary radical feminists (TERF’s) believe that the immutability of biological sex makes transgender identities illegitimate. TERF’s define feminism as a political movement that is exclusive to the experiences of women who were assigned female at birth and raised as a “biological” woman (Fernandez, Victoria & DePalma 2020, 751). To disseminate their trans-exclusionary ideology, TERF’s not only manipulate foundational feminist premises but deploy language used by the extreme right (Fernandez, Victoria & DePalma 2020, 749). In recent years, internet users have observed a trend in the rebranding of feminism in online spaces, namely the TERF-to-tradwife pipelines on TikTok and Twitter (Woodzicka 2023). Tradwife denotes a married woman who believes and adheres to traditional gender roles, as a homemaker and wife to a breadwinner husband. In her paper on “The #Tradwife Persona and the Rise of Radicalized Domesticity”, Devin Proctor argued that the tradwife persona not only universalizes the “biologically based” gender binary but heterosexuality. By framing white, middle-class heteronormative ideals of femininity and masculinity from the United States in the 1950s as traditional, the tradwife persona thereby reifies them as normative and fixed (Proctor 2023, 9 & 10). Tradwives support the false dichotomy of feminism and femininity that has been brought about by what they believe to be the rise in “woke anti-feminist rhetoric” (Proctor 2023, 9). In The Love Witch, Elaine becomes somewhat of a mouthpiece for Biller to perpetuate tradwife and TERF rhetoric. Whilst Biller herself identifies as a feminist, since the release of The Love Witch many of her fans have criticized the director for her transmisogynist tweets and commentary embedded in her work. In a now-deleted 2016 tweet, Biller tweeted that “some people think that all feminists are transphobic because feminism implies that there is lived experience which they find to be exclusionary”. The Love Witch does this by inscribing witchcraft onto the cisgender body. In the film, the capacity of Elaine’s witchcraft to channel the “sexual power of the female”, rests on the cis woman’s body with Elaine’s anatomy factoring into all of her witchcraft (Stager 2023). Not only does Elaine use bloodied tampons in her rituals but her coven infers that she would not have the “power” to find love if it were not for her uterus (Macfarlane 2016). Given Biller’s track record, the incorporation of transphobic rhetoric could also extend to what she identifies as “feminine-leaning” spaces in The Love Witch. The Victoriana tearoom that Biller cited as the “thematic backbone” of the film becomes somewhat loaded with these connotations when a character reminds us that this exclusionary “feminine” space is “for women only” (Macfarlane 2016).

The Love Witch is distinctly post-feminist in its portrayal of the feminist killjoy. In her paper on post-feminism on a transnational level, Annisa Beta also identified the distinctly Western view of post-feminist sensibilities. Namely, the re-emergence of discourses on sexual difference, a preoccupation with the body, makeovers, self-surveillance, choice and empowerment (2021, 213). Yet, regardless of geography, these themes continue to be structured by inequalities pertaining to race, class, sexuality, age and gender (Beta 2021, 213; Gill 2007, 149). In her foundational paper on the topic, “Postfeminist Media Culture: A Sensibility” Rosalind Gill defined post-feminism as a combination of feminist and anti-feminist sensibilities, one which does not require a static notion of feminism as a point of comparison (Gill 2007, 148-149). In post-feminist media, the body on the one hand becomes a site of empowerment and self-discipline (Gill 2007, 149). Yet is simultaneously remodelled to the narrowing conventions of female beauty (Gill 2007, 149). While women were once portrayed as passive objects of the male gaze, they are now active sexual subjects who are liberated by the choice to present themselves in an objectified manner (Gill 2007, 151). In The Love Witch, not only does Elaine “co-opt the male gaze to fetishize herself”, but Trish embodies what post-feminism sees as “anti-sex” or “prudish” for criticizing (or “policing”) Elaine for doing so (The Culture Trip; Gill 2007, 151). In Girls, Guts, Giallo’s podcast episode on the film, cohosts Annie-Rose Malamet and Luce Tomlin-Benner observed how Trish is often villainized as “conservative” and “frumpy” in reviews of the film, while Elaine is framed as “liberated” and “glamorous” (2023). However, as Gill points out, the only women who are active sexual “subjects” in post-feminism are heterosexual women who are often young, white and conventionally attractive (152). Alongside the reconfiguration of sexual agency and empowerment, post-feminism has also seen the resurgence of notions of natural sexual difference across the media (Gill 2007, 158). According to these post-feminist texts, feminism prevents women from partaking in the pleasures of traditional femininity. The “return of the repressed” that Gill wrote of in 2007, has seen a resurgence in recent years with the newfound tradwife trends online (Gill 2007, 162). Therefore, The Love Witch is a postfeminist text that positions the feminist killjoy as policing the protagonist’s liberation.

Love Witch lovers I urge you to go and watch its predecessor All The Colours of the Dark (1972).

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Filmography:

The Love Witch. 2016. Directed by Anna Biller. California, United States: Anna Biller Productions. DVD.

                                                                       Reference List:

Ahmed, Sara. 2010. The Promise of Happiness. Duke University Press. https://research.ebsco.com/linkprocessor/plink?id=91e263fe-1f33-3208-a846-1dfb80d7feaa.

“An Interview and List with Filmmaker Anna Biller”. Grimoire Magazine. Published 2016. https://www.wearegrimoire.com/nonfictionarchive/anna-biller

Carrera-Fernández, María Victoria, and Renée DePalma. 2020. “Feminism Will Be Trans-Inclusive or It Will Not Be: Why Do Two Cis-Hetero Woman Educators Support Transfeminism?” Sociological Review 68 (4): 745–62. doi:10.1177/0038026120934686.

Fuller, Graham. 2016. “Why the Erotic Feminist Staire The Love Witch Puts a Hex on Men.” Culture Trip. Published November 15, 2016. https://theculturetrip.com/usa/new-york/articles/why-the-erotic-feminist-satire-the-love-witch-puts-a-hex-on-men

Gender in an Era of Post-Truth Populism : Pedagogies, Challenges and Strategies. 2021. Bloomsbury Academic. https://research.ebsco.com/linkprocessor/plink?id=ac04c86a-3e4b-3300-b18c-088879ead5f3.

Gill, Rosalind. 2007. “Postfeminist Media Culture: Elements of a Sensibility.” European Journal of Cultural Studies 10 (2): 147–66. doi:10.1177/1367549407075898.

Macfarlane, Steve. 2016. “I’m Actually Trying to Create a Film for Women: Anna Biller on The Love Witch.” The Filmmaker Magazine. Published June 23, 2016. https://filmmakermagazine.com/98928-im-actually-trying-create-a-film-for-women-anna-biller-on-the-love-witch/

Malamet, Annie Rose and Tomlin-Benner, Luce. 2023. “The Love Witch (2016).” February 10, 2023. In Girls, Guts, Giallo. Podcast. MP3 audio, 1:44:24.

Proctor, Devin. 2023. “The #Tradwife Persona and the Rise of Radicalized Domesticity.” Persona Studies 8 (2). doi:10.21153/psj2022vol8no2art1645.

Smyth, Araby. 2024. “The Feminist Killjoy Handbook: The Radical Potential of Getting in the Way.” Gender Place and Culture, February. doi:10.1080/0966369X.2024.2325744.

Sorrento, Matthew. 2017. “The Way She Looks: An Interview with Anna Biller on The Love Witch.” Film International (Enskede, Sweden) 15 (2 [80]): 126–30. doi:10.1386/fiin.15.2.126_7.

Stanger, Toni. 2023. “Femininity and the Female Experience in Anna Biller’s The Love Witch.” Medium. Published July 9, 2023. https://tonistanger.medium.com/femininity-and-the-female-experience-in-anna-billers-the-love-witch-8af827c1c8afn

Stümer, Jenny. 2022. “(Un)Masking Femininity: Desire and Fantasy in Anna Biller’s The Love Witch.” Feminist Media Studies 22 (5): 1211–26. doi:10.1080/14680777.2021.1879195.

Woodzicka, Lauren. 2023. “Tradwives, Terfs, and the Terrors of TikTok.” Fms. Published November 28, 2023. https://fsm.ink/tradwives-terfs-and-the-terrors-of-tiktok/amp/?fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTAAAR3khCkFd4909p6DsmtSaB5FWMDQ4egC9p_0LGIuzpHpEXuJJ-TWYM56N7o_aem_ARZkTDcaYsEfHF2BN8k00zQmu-vMMXS-GJ_NZAO8FLF4CSkE31WqCNDVP1zqsNTrAl-WVfL6KkYnii-s8gXvc5ro

1. Yet, this does not mean that the feminist killjoy is unable to enjoy what they are critiquing (Ahmed 2023, 89).