Ruxandra Grrr ’s Reviews > Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation > Status Update
Ruxandra Grrr
is 17% done
Interesting that human sexuality (including women's bodies and queerness) were not heavily politicized until the 12th century.
Also interesting that there were women surgeons working and employed by cities around the 14th century.
— Dec 18, 2025 02:22AM
Also interesting that there were women surgeons working and employed by cities around the 14th century.
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Ruxandra Grrr ’s Previous Updates
Ruxandra Grrr
is 80% done
There is only one recorded event of men actually taking up arms and freeing the women of their village from being burned alive 🙃🙃
— Dec 19, 2025 11:12AM
Ruxandra Grrr
is 61% done
This chapter on the body and how it started to be seen as a machine, the heart a pump, the fist a hammer and so on, turning humans I to abstractions, is fascinating.
— Dec 19, 2025 02:18AM
Ruxandra Grrr
is 45% done
Women accused of being scolds were muzzled and paraded in the streets, like dogs.
— Dec 19, 2025 12:34AM
Ruxandra Grrr
is 39% done
In the 16th century, France and Germany were making midwives spy for the state, they had to report all pregnancies and even lactation, and women who had abortions risked execution. Literally to keep the labor force going.
— Dec 18, 2025 11:57PM
Ruxandra Grrr
is 11% done
Love listening to how peasants resisted their abusive, brutal lords. Remembering my history textbook and these incredibly graphic descriptions of how the leaders of peasant uprisings were tortured to death by the lords (in what today is Romania). I now think that was a warning, not information. What you get when you try to resist.
— Dec 16, 2025 11:59AM
Ruxandra Grrr
is 7% done
Starting from an analysis of ‘body-politics,’ feminists have not only revolutionized the contemporary philosophical and political discourse, but they have also begun to revalorize the body. This has been a necessary step both to counter the negativity attached to the identification of femininity with corporeality, and to create a more holistic vision of what it means to be a human being.
— Dec 16, 2025 07:51AM
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E Money
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rated it 5 stars
Dec 18, 2025 08:23AM
Right!? The bit about capitalism needing an ever expanding labor pool and therefore converting women into baby makers (make the bourgeoisie more laborers to extract wealth from!) is wild. The process she details of women’s many other means of labor being forcibly taken from them. Similarly the increasing crackdown on queerness for the same reasons. This book keeps blowing my mind.
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@E Money, yeah!! this quote absolutely enraged me: First, efforts were made by the political authorities to co-opt the youngest and most rebellious male workers, by means of a vicious sexual politics that gave them access to free sex, and turned class antagonism into an antagonism against proletarian women. As Jacques Rossiaud has shown in Medieval Prostitution (1988), in France, the municipal authorities practically decriminalized rape, provided the victims were women of the lower class. In 14th-century Venice, the rape of an unmarried proletarian woman rarely called for more than a slap on the wrist, even in the frequent case in which it involved a group assault (Ruggiero 1989: 91–108).Like, imagine the damage that we've only begun to undo a few years ago (and still it's an uphill battle and we've still kinda hardly dented it).
It's also amazing how old the things we're dealing with now are, the same radicalizing of young men by sacrificing women :(
The vanguard of fascism always seems to be the sexually frustrated young man. When Indonesia was decolonizing and the capitalists wanted to defeat the left and make sure they could hold neocolonial power over it, the US-backed death squads that killed hundreds of thousands were young men literally convinced that communist feminists were using witchcraft to make their dicks not work so that women could dominate them. Just complete insane nonsense.
