Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons^™

Witches As Queer(Ed) Comrades: How Patriarchy, Sexism And Religious Fanaticism Fueled The Early Modern European Witch Hunts, Iris S. De Lis

University Honors Theses

Patriarchy, sexism, and religious fanaticism each played a complementary and compounding role in creating the conditions for the brutal campaign of violent terror, torture, and mass murder that we now refer to as the early modern European witch hunts. In this paper I explore, by way of a cross-discipline literature review through a feminist and queer theoretical lens, the ways in which those who were accused of being witches in early modern Europe were rendered queer subjects by dominant organized religion, the state and society--regardless of whether they ever actually identified as witches or practiced witchcraft. The term queer subject …