may we shed our attachments to disciplined ways of knowing”

from the Introduction...  "The very qualities of beauty, fertility, and maternalism that constitute the female side of the mythical gender binary are themselves transient; femininity ultimately shrivels, hardens, and decays.  The witch—once goddess and then crone, a youthful beauty morphed into the grotesque hag—is arguably a memento mori, a personified reminder of the inevitability of aging and death. Of course, the hag is not just an old person, but an old woman specifically, whose discernment and infertility pose a threat to heteropatriarchy and the narrow space it reserves for girls and women. Both in folklore and in justifications of real-life witch killings, the witch is the anti-feminine; she is excess, no longer useful to men, a drain on resources without beauty or fecundity to contribute in return. In this way, the witch sits at the nexus of gender and horror, her terrifying impact rooted in a kind of hetero-erotic bait and switch where youthful femininity is suddenly replaced with embodied cronehood.  We see this theme in one of the most frightening scenes in the 1980 Stanley Kubric film, The Shining, in which a young and sexy woman lures Jack Nicholson towards her as she emerges naked from a bathtub, only to then transform into a cackling, decaying hag. We see the seductress-hag, again, in the 2015 film The Witch, when an adolescent boy, Caleb, is wandering in the woods and encounters a young woman emerging from a moss-covered, brambly hut wearing a red cloak with abundant cleavage and an eager smile. As she leans in to embrace and kiss Caleb, her arm is revealed to be the arm of an old woman. The horror."