From Salem To Social Media: Reimagining Witch Hunts In The Digital Era
- IJLLR Journal
- 6 days ago
- 1 min read
Madhu Ramesh, National Law University, Jodhpur
ABSTRACT
Witch hunts are not a historical relic of the bygone era, but an enduring patriarchal weapon of control that has shape-shifted from the flames of the pyre during the early modern European pyre to the online pixelated network of the contemporary digital sphere, both of which seek to police and subjugate women’s bodies. This paper seeks to employ a framework of feminist jurisprudence and Marxist feminist theory to analyse and deconstruct the historical “witch” as a figure created to enforce patriarchal norms and facilitate capitalist accumulation. This framework is then applied to modern India, where intersectional analysis reveals how caste and class dynamics perpetuate physical witch hunts against marginalized Dalit and Adivasi women. The paper further examines the metamorphosis of this phenomenon into digital witch hunts, analyzing social media campaigns against journalists and the ‘Sulli Deals’ case as examples of technologically- mediated misogyny designed to silence outspoken women, wherein the technology changes, however the target (the transgressive woman) and the goal (her annihilation) remain chillingly constant. The paper concludes by attempting to propose a multi-pronged framework for legal, structural, and digital reform to combat this terrifying continuum of gendered violence.
Keywords: witch hunting, feminist jurisprudence, intersectionality, technologically mediated misogyny, digital witch hunts
