Da fogueira ao espaço reprodutivo: um estudo da teoria da diferença sexual em Silvia Federici

Abstract

The present work examines the historical concrete meanings of the female body in the emergence of capitalism through the phenomenon of witch hunt in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Drawing on the work of Silvia Federici, it investigates how the fabrication of the modern woman was articulated to the processes of expropriation, disciplining, and the new organization of social reproduction in the context of primitive accumulation. By highlighting the structural entwinement between capitalism and patriarchy – particularly the centrality of violence in the production of the female body as a reproductive body functional to accumulation – Federici critically mobilizes three theoretical fields: Marxism, Foucauldian genealogy, and feminism. The dissertation argues that foucauldian genealogy, especially in its analytics of biopolitics, is indispensable for the analysis of the mechanisms of disciplining and normalization of bodies, yet insufficient to account for the historical production of the female body, insofar as it does not thematize the political economy of reproduction, relegating to the margins the repressive and destructive face of power.