Caliban and the Witchand wider bodily geographies

Post-structuralist and feminist scholars gained new insights into bodies as ‘sites of contestation’ by exposing power’s influence on them – it is this nexus that is captured in Silvia Federici’s exhaustive analysis centering on the mysterious figure of the ‘witch’ and firmly pointing to the power of the profit-motivated, capitalist system, ever patriarchal in its repressive control of women (and their bodies), nature, and the wider society. Her work on bodies and capital emerged from the cross-fertilization of Marxist and feminist geographies that shaped the autonomist epistemology and intellectual strengths that have contested the masculinist denial of sexed, classed, racialized, illegalized, homophobic, disabled bodies and their relation to power. In the manuscript, I elaborate Federici’s analysis of women’s bodies and capital within feminist bodily geographies but also show the key lacks in leftist and radical reactions on issues around women’s oppression. Following Federici’s imperatives of capitalism, patriarchy and primitive accumulation in Europe and drawing from my field experiences in India and elsewhere, I argue that the global diffusion of capitalism to non-capitalist regions pointing towards the variations in the forms of accumulation in different places. Caliban and the Witch transcends to many feminisms.