This special section of Whatever: A Transdisciplinary Journal of Queer Theories and Studies will function as a critical retrospective on Robert Eggers’s 2015 film The Witch. While much has been written on the film in relation to feminist theory, this special section seeks to excavate the queer possibilities of Eggers’s now iconic film. Taking a broad view of queer theory, we imagine queerness as that which challenges binaries and hierarchies. In this way, The Witch might be understood as queer in terms of the challenges it poses to heteronormative, patriarchal structures, as well as through its dismantling of the boundaries between self and other, human and animal, nature and culture. Similarly, The Witch might be read as a queer due to its treatment of monstrosity as that which disrupts normative systems and undermines conventional epistemologies. We invite article submissions from scholars across all disciplines to consider this influential film as a disruptive queer artefact.

Potential topics include but are not limited to:

-       Queer readings of The Witch

-       Gender and gender performance

-       Sexuality and the family

-       Camp and humour

-       Queer ecologies and animal studies

-       Ecocriticism and new materialism

-       Histories of witchcraft

-       Religion, American religious history and Puritanism

-       Monsters and monster theory

-       The Witch in relation to Eggers’s wider body of work

-       Biopower and biopolitics

-       Race and identity

-       Colonialism and American origins

Articles should be approximately 8000 words in length and should include an abstract (300 words) and brief author bio (no more than 150 words). Submissions are accepted in English, Italian, French, German and Spanish. Further information on the journal and house style can be found here: https://whatever.cirque.unipi.it/

Articles should be emailed to Miranda Corcoran and Andrea Di Carlo at  miranda.corcoran@ucc.ie by June 15th, 2026.