From goddesses to witches. A feminine metamorphosis in the cultural history of the West
Abstract
The article is a set of notes about the way in which women historically lost their sexual autonomy (and their anatomy), derived from the reading of different scriptural and figurative texts that influenced the socio-economical, cultural and political structures in the modern era. I attempt to demonstrate 1) that at the core of the heteropatriarchal capitalist single-couple system there is a long-standing cultural history of the disciplining of women’s bodies and sexuality that led, in modern times, to the elevation of virginity (and chastity) and marriage (and forced reproduction) as identitarian and consubstantial values of the feminine, and 2) that, for such purposes, the Christian world gradually constructed the concept of witch to define women of power who, finally, during the 16th and 17th centuries —and even in the 18th— were tortured and burned at stake because of the practice of their autonomy, in its different forms.