Valerie Miller

Thesis Name

Thesis Abstract

This research addresses the silencing of women by employing the term “witch-hunt” as a metaphor for contemporary systems of exclusion. Historically, women were condemned for practising witchcraft during the 16th century in Europe and Southern Italy. Within an Australian context, these consequences of women not aligning with the status quo or resisting historical patriarchal systems within white-collar institutions endure metaphorical witch hunts where they are discredited, marginalised, or punished (Byrne, 2021; Evans, 2019; Flood et al., 2020). This project explores how literature becomes a symbolic site for confronting social and cultural tensions pertaining to women.

This project reimagines the genre in Australia to confront contemporary, symbolic ‘witch hunts’ that silence women and invalidate diasporic epistemologies. The PLR investigates how cultural memory, carried through migration, adapts to new environments, sharing these social injustices while sustaining intergenerational inheritance.

The ‘2023 Australian Senate Inquiry into menopause and perimenopause’ underpins the urgent need to recognise how women in their 50s are disadvantaged in professional, cultural and social contexts, with evidence of lost productivity, discrimination, and inadequate policy support, including a sense of their own ‘disappearance’ as women of purpose and power. This national acknowledgement highlights both the social and cultural stakes of my PhD, positioning my research as a timely intervention into how literature, through magical realism, can symbolically confront and reimagine the silencing of women during their 50s.

Although there are studies examining magical realism through Latin American, postcolonial, and feminist frameworks, there is a notable absence of research on its Southern Italian lineage (Bowers, 2004). Few studies consider how Italian magical realism, first conceptualised by Massimo Bontempelli, intersects with the oral traditions, fairy tales, and folk beliefs that predate its development in Latin America. Equally, little attention has been given to how Southern Italian spiritual traditions, including la religione vecchia and Stregheria, inform literary representations of feminine knowledge, midwifery, and ritual within Australian contexts (Rountree, 2015). My PhD will address these gaps by examining how gendered, diasporic, and matrilineal forms of power may be articulated through the Italian migrant experience in Australia.