If there is an act of love, it is remembrance.
Montserrat Roig Fransitorra
What does trial and death have to do with witchcraft Elisabet Cerdà of Castellterçol, in 1620, with the murder of Jordina Martinez, in Manresa, on April 14, 2021? And with the loongaping What makes women earn on average 22.08% less than men? And with women spending twice as much time on homework, compared to men?
Until recently and, in fact, perhaps for many of the people who will read this article, the Witch Hunt it was a combination of medieval darkness, superstition and Church, absolutely disconnected from our lives in a developed world, rationally and which removed religion from collective decision making. But this interpretation has long been replaced in the historical research with a gender perspective.
The feminist movement sets, among other goals, the recovery of knowledge and figures of women in all fields, from history, literature, mathematics, medicine or the arts. Confronted with the idea that history or the economy, for example, is universal and neutral, the feminist movement and the anti-racist and decolonial movement have shown that what we consider to be a normal Continuous (re) creationwhich serves to strengthen a political system that functions on three levels: patriarchy, capitalism and racism.
Thus, feminist historiography locates the origins of many of the structural inequalities that our women will live in 2022 in a series of events that took place from the sixteenth century, known as Witch Hunt. A genocide that took place in Europe and colonial America, promoted by civil courts and that in Catalonia thousand women tortured and killed.
One of the reference works is’ Caliban and the Witch. Women, body and primitive accumulation ‘(2004), where Silvia Federici reviews the process of primitive accumulation that Marx theorizes as the origin of capitalism and shows that the witch hunt is first a selective punishment that becomes collective in so far as it is exemplary for all women. Second, by devaluing lives, it cheapens the work, knowledge, and practices that their owners have made of their bodies, their desires, and their reproductive capacity. And, lastly, this is a strategy to disempower women. the witch hunt institutionalizes the control of women by men and therefore the hierarchy between men and women, which they reject.
This fundamental historical moment of modern capitalism, patriarchy and racismmaintains the relations of gender and racial inequality, which are structural and survive, despite the struggles of the feminist movement, formal equality and the commitment of governments, in the low presence of women in spaces of power and decision, the commitment to care work, the salary gap or the 87 murders of women in Cataloniasince 2012.
Witch hunts target, prosecute and punish dissident women which, living freely, threatens established power relations. This individual punishment that disciplines the rest It stays very much alive every time a woman is harassed and threatened on social networks, with violence aimed at making her invisible and silencing her, to subdue us all.
Related news
A resolution tabled by ERC, JxCat, the CUP and En Comú Podem will be put to the vote in Parliament on Wednesday, aimed at: restore the historical memory of women convicted, executed and suppressed for witchcraft and promote gender-based research on witch-hunts.
Reviewing what we know from a feminist, leftist and decolonial perspective is urgent to meet the challenges of our society. Reclaim the memory of so many murdered women and repairing the injustices committed against them five centuries ago is essential to understanding and fighting the inequalities we live in today in order to build a free, democratic, socially just, equitable country that upholds women’s rights and therefore human rights. guarantee. It’s also #TransformacióFeminista.
Reference-www.elperiodico.com