Conference Program

Throughout Western history, certain embodied subjectivities have been constructed as deviations from the dominant social order. Among these, the figure of the witch and the figure of the disabled person emerge in particularly emblematic ways, both inscribed within genealogies of marginalization that have produced representations of bodies perceived as monstrous and deviant (De Castro, Zona, & Bocci, 2022; Federici, 2004; Goffman, 1986). In cultural and media narratives, the witch is frequently portrayed as a deformed and morally suspicious bodymind, associated with dark powers and forms of knowledge not legitimized by patriarchy (Stanmore, 2024). Similarly, disabled bodies have historically been subjected to processes of stigmatization and control, constructed as defective or unproductive in relation to normative paradigms of productivity (Barnes,2016). Through such representations, media and visual cultures contribute to reproducing bodily hierarchies and to delineating the boundaries of the normative human.

Despite the growing scholarly attention devoted to these fields of research, the intersection between disability and representations of the figure of the witch remains largely underexplored, particularly with regard to the ways in which disabled bodymindes have historically been associated with forms of deviance and monstrosity analogous to those attributed to the witch.

This paper brings Witch Studies and Critical Disability Studies into dialogue in order to investigate how the witch and the disabled person have historically been produced as “other subjectivities” within cultural and socio-political regimes of normalization. Drawing on Crip Theory (McRuer, 2006), Feminist Disability Studies (Garland-Thomson, 2002; Kafer, 2013), and recent developments in Witch Studies (Chaudhuri & Ward, 2025), it explores the convergences between historical processes of persecution targeting non-normative embodied capacities and forms of knowledge that have contributed to defining the limits of what is considered acceptable and legitimate.

If, on the one hand, the figure of the witch and that of the disabled person have been used to mark the boundaries of the normative human, on the other they are today the object of processes of symbolic and political reappropriation. In several contemporary contexts, particularly within feminist and queer movements, witchcraft is being rearticulated as a spiritual and political practice that creates spaces of agency and collective care (Sollee, 2017). In some grassroots communities, contemporary witchcraft practices become spaces in which marginalized subjectivities reclaim their bodies and their forms of knowledge, challenging ableist and patriarchal narratives that have historically rendered them objects of stigma and shame.

Through a theoretical and interdisciplinary approach, this contribution therefore proposes to read the figure of the witch not only as a symbolic figure of marginality but also as a political and pedagogical practice of resistance (Hundley, 2020). The reappropriation of the witch can thus be interpreted as a form of crip counter-narrative: an imaginative and communal dispositif that redefines the relationship between the body, the mind and processes of political and identity reclamation, opening spaces for practices of care and self determination grounded in the embodied knowledges of marginalized subjectivities.