01/07/2026 15:00 - 17:10

HALL: Pola - A203

Contact: Russo E.

Chair: Carnevale L.

This panel takes Re-membering Medusa as a critical lens through which to rethink contemporary spirituality from radical and intersectional perspectives. Its point of departure is the 2012 initiative Medusa's Head Has Been Restored, an international ritual performed by groups of contemporary Witches, which sought to reclaim Medusa from centuries of patriarchal demonization and epistemic violence, reframing the Gorgon as a figure of female power, rage, and resistance within Goddess and alternative spiritual milieus. Over the past decade, Medusa's meanings have further evolved. Increasingly, she has been mobilized not only as a feminist symbol but as an intersectional one, invoked to address embodied difference, marginalization, trauma, queerness, racialization, and disability in spiritual, mythic, and ritual contexts. Her figure thus serves as a powerful prototype for examining how other mythic, saintly, or archetypal personas are similarly reworked within contemporary spiritualities to contest gender essentialism, challenge binary cosmologies, and articulate more complex configurations of power and identity. Moving beyond polarized academic readings of alternative spirituality as either empowering and feminist or conservative and essentialist, this panel invites contributions that explore how gender, sexuality, race, and embodiment are negotiated within contemporary spiritual practices and discourses. Drawing on religious studies, intersectionality, gender studies, and critical myth studies, we focus on "re-membering" as both an act of remembrance and a practice of reassembling fragmented bodies, histories, and subjectivities. By centering Medusa as a dynamic and contested emblem, the panel highlights contemporary spirituality as a key site for the rearticulation of intersectional imaginaries, where myth, politics, and lived experience converge in ways that call for renewed scholarly attention.