Dykes,witches,and cults: ‘women's studies’ in mass culture

Abstract

Feminist scholars have generated a vibrant body of work on the history and state of the field of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Yet, little has been written about how ideas about the field circulate in mass culture. This article has two goals. First, I offer a preliminary survey of how ideas about ‘women's studies’ and ‘gender studies’ took shape in the five decades following the institutionalisation of the first women's studies programmes in US colleges and universities in the 1970s. Second, this article zooms in on the representation of the field in two TV shows that aired in the immediate aftermath of the 2016 US presidential election: the 2017 season of Ryan Murphy's anthology series American Horror Story, and the Charmed reboot (2018–2022). Through careful study of a pair of fictional women's studies students, I track the multiple, internally conflicting, and generationally distinct ideas about feminism that travel together in contemporary representations of the field. In doing so, I demonstrate how wildly inaccurate and pernicious ideas about the field take hold as collective common sense, participating, inadvertently or not, in the right's ongoing assault on the study of gender and sexuality.