Dalla parte delle streghe. Violenza epistemica e pratiche di giustizia riparativa e trasformativa: la narrazione estrema di Luisa Muraro

The popularity of ‘the witch’ in the Italian feminist imagery was spurred by the publication of two influential works at the peak of the 1970s feminist wave: the Italian translation of Witches, Midwives, & Nurses: A History of Women Healers by Ehrenreich and Englisch (1975) and La signora del gioco. La caccia alle streghe interpretata dalle sue vittime by Muraro (1976). In such works, the history of witches and witch-hunt was retrieved and read in light of central issues to the 1970s demonstrations, such as practices of control over female bodies, the marginalization of women from science and power, the suspect towards women’s community practices of mutual aid, with witches affirming as a landmark symbolic figure still invoked by contemporary transfeminist movements. In this article, I will retrieve the figure of the witch as absorbed in the feminist political imagery in the belief that Muraro’s operation of retelling the history of witch-hunt from the perspective of the accused in order to give them back their voices through an extreme narration (2006) can be a useful contribution to the international philosophical debate that has been developing in recent years on epistemic injustice (Fricker 2007) and on possible restorative (Walker 2010; Song 2021; Page 2021) or transformative (Palomba 2023) processes to react to such injustice, and thus inspire contemporary practices of reparation/transformation that involve not only the institutions that specifically promoted the injustices committed, but the communities that are historically and symbolically connected to such violence.