From Pombagira’s Crossroads: Undoing Patriarchal (Mis)Representations of ‘Wicked Women’

This essay discusses feminist ideas in connection to the occulture—Christopher Partridge’s term for the re-enchantment of art, popular culture, and everyday life through esoteric and spiritual currents—present in opera, musical theater, and film, focusing on femmes fatales, tricksters and ‘wicked women’ in a transcultural approach to religion, (Western) esotericism, and the performing arts. The spiritual–scientific embodiment of Afro-Brazilian traditions is explored through the figure of Pombagira—a Brazilian occultural creation of a female enchantress with mystical powers connected to healing and sex, often placed in patriarchal opposition to her male counterpart, Exu. Drawing on Partridge’s notions of occulture and Walter Mignolo’s understanding of decoloniality, the Western gendering imposed on Pombagira as a purveyor of evil is discussed as both mythology and potential epistemicide. The thesis statement presented here is that the Pombagira episteme is an underlying emblem throughout art and scholarship invested in queering essential binary categories of womanhood, as seen in staged adaptations of Verdi’s La forza del destino (1862), Bizet’s Carmen (1875), and numerous cinematic Lola incarnations—Marlene Dietrich’s in Der blaue Engel (1930), Gwen Verdon’s in Damn Yankees (1958), and Almodóvar’s in Todo sobre mi madre (1999). This indisciplinary reading connects Gloria Anzaldúa’s queer feminist practice of spiritual mestizaje with the Pombagira as an occultural anti-patriarchal force.