CONTEXTUAL ANCHOR — 'Why Witches'

'Why Witches' by Xaviere Gauthier

In this opening statement to the late 70s feminist literary review Sorcieres (Witches), Gauthier writes about the radical and revolutionary power of the witch, and why she is a powerful symbol in this context of second-wave feminism, and the women's movement more broadly. Gauthier herself is a French feminist writer, journalist and academic, and the editor of this journal, published from 1975 to 1982. She has been prominent in feminist activism and writing, and is still active today. 

She answers 'Why Witches?', the question posed throughout the essay, with 'because witches dance... because witches sing... are alive... are rapturous'. Gauthier is drawing connections between the body as understood in women's liberation movements of the late 20th century and the political/historical/mythical/fictional configuring of female bodies and their defiance through the figure of the witch. The politics of the body is undeniably gender specific, and she explores how it is our instrument to enact and embody our own agency. 

In Western society politically and historically, witches were knowledge-holders of the body; healers, caretakers, and significantly, knowledgable in both midwifery and contraceptives. Gauthier holds this history this alongside the fight for reproductive rights and abortion that is a key concern of second-wave feminism. 

Sexual power and freedom is another aspect of the witch, and feminist ideology. This self-knowledge is viewed as threatening to male power and patriarchal order, and so female sexuality is repressed. Not for the witch however — she remains a symbol of resistance, of the "threat" of female agency and sexuality. 

Gauthier also looks to the fictive and mythic construction of the witch, in the stories that we hear and tell. She identifies the binary archetypes that are used to restrain and define women — good/wicked, young/old, beautiful/ugly, idealised/scorned, sanctified/satanised, worshipped/martyred, and argues against this "trap" of binary identities. "Why let ourselves be locked in a choice of opposites that are two sides of the same coin, which is the exclusion of women...?" (pp. 202)

With these historical, political and symbolic parallels, Gauthier puts forth the witch as a unifying figure of defiance against patriarchal oppression, and reminds us that we hold power in threatening, radical self-possession. She answers herself with a felt conviction, in her belief in self defined identity and experience, and proposes the witch as a fluid conduit-body through which we might nurture all our truths. 

I've been working off and drawing from this text since week three, this is a rather delayed analysis but it's been central to my thinking and experimentation. I've tried to understand and use the (witch)body, or configurations of it, as framed in this essay to realise and materialise a sense of power and identity that is deviant and defiant. 

Gauthier, X. (1980), Pourquoi Sorcières?,  in de Courtivron, I., & Marks, E. (Eds.)Newt French Feminisms: An Anthology, New York: Schoken Books.

CONTEXTUAL ANCHOR — The Cyborg Manifesto

Donna Haraway is an American feminist academic and author. She has written extensively on the meeting of science and the feminist agenda, and multi-speciesism in the context of our ecological crisis. 

A Cyborg Manifesto is one of her best-known works, first published in 1985. It is considered to be a seminal text in socialist-feminist theory, presenting arguments for the blurring of traditional binaries of human/animal and human/machine. Its context is that of a pre-internet time, where information technology was still being conceived and its potential theorised about. Science fiction was another field generating similar ideas around posthumanism and what these new technologies could eventuate. 

Haraway presents the 'image of the Cyborg' as a means to push our definitions around what is human and what is not (humans/machines, the two genders) further, or more specifically, together. Cyborgs, as a hybrid of these binaries, offer an alternative figure towards which we can understand and build a more inclusive and liberated social reality. 

'By the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorisied and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism — in short, cyborgs.' (Haraway, 2016/1985, pp. 7)

She also constructs her argument/language in an interesting way, bringing science and religion and myth together. This hybrid of worldviews brings us somewhere into the futurespace, but always with an undercurrent of the primordial. 

I keep coming back to this text because it captures the deviance and creative power that she writes about, that I want to find through my methods and design research. I think there's power and an interesting potential in the 'coupling' that she refers to the cyborg as a product of. What else could be coupled to achieve similar ends? Writing this post now, I have already conducted a number of experiments around this text and drawn parallels to the image of the Witch. I hope to carry Haraway's call-to-arms of cyborgs into our time, in the twenty-first century and beyond, and extend these ideas in provocative ways. 


Haraway, D., (2016). Manifestly Haraway, University of Minnesota Press. (Original work published 1985)