The subversive potential of witchcraft: A reflection on Federici's self-reproducing movements

Abstract

This is a theoretical contribution that draws on the work of Silvia Federici, and particularly her book, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the body and primitive accumulation to discuss crises, struggles over social reproduction, and feminist activist organizing. We refer to incidents of women's organizing namely the Parisian pétroleuses (the female supporters of the Paris Commune), the Kurdish Women's Movement in Rojava, the Urban Land committees in Venezuela, and the 21st century witch‐hunting in Africa, and discuss colonial and patriarchal strategies of exploitation and feminist resistance across different space‐times. We then suggest that the struggles over social reproduction are intertwined with resistances that enable women to participate in communities that re‐embed them in the spheres of feminist activism. The article concludes that the crises, including the gendered effects of the Covid‐19 pandemic, should be discussed in relation to our capacity to organize in ways that nurture values of cooperation, equality, solidarity, and care, and eliminate unjust access to rights driven by patriarchal and statist repressive modes of social organization.

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ORCID for Maria Daskalaki: orcid.org/0000-0001-7860-1955

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