Cojoining the Witch and the Cyborg in Feminist Theory: Revisiting Gender Related Violence Through Old and New Materialism

Abstract

This article brings 'old' and 'new' feminist materialist insights into conversation, exploring their respective conceptualisations of gender through the motifs of the 'witch' and the 'cyborg'. The witch emphasises economic structures and capital's penetration into all spheres of life, foregrounding the material conditions of oppressed groups. The cyborg offers a more dispersed critique across entangled issues of economy, technology, and ecology, seeking transformative potential from within existing power relations through ambiguous affinities and everyday resistance. We apply these materialist lenses to examine law's framing of Gender Related Violence (GRV). Despite decades of legal measures addressing gender violence, fundamental questions remain unresolved: how to capture violence as both a specific, embodied experience and a phenomenon reproducing broader gender power; how to acknowledge violence's pervasiveness without conflating feminised subjects with passivity; and what forms of state intervention and redress are appropriate. These debates have intensified amid contemporary calls for a binding international convention on GRV. We explore how re-thinking GRV through old and new materialisms can contribute to feminist legal engagement with the definitional parameters of gendered violence, particularly regarding the normative framing of 'gendered violence', 'subjectivity and victimhood', and 'the role of state intervention’.