The Sexist Microphysics of Power: The Alcàsser Case and the Construction of Sexual Terror
(By Nerea Barjola)
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| Author | Nerea Barjola |
This riveting work of feminist theory puts words to the lingering threat of sexual violence and the way it seeps into the body. This is what creates the mental map of places women sense they can and cannot go, the hours they should not be alone in the street, and the activities they dare not do. It is a cartography of sexual terror that links the body with its environment in what Nerea Barjola calls “body geography.” Barjola retraces the high-profile search for three teenage girls gone missing from the town of Alcàsser in 1992 while on their way to a nightclub and the media frenzy of the ensuing trial. It is a case whose strangeness and brutality still continues to draw popular speculation decades later. Cultural fascination with the harm done to women’s bodies and the graphic rehearsal of the details in news and media, Barjola argues, fuels narratives that draw women to self-limit and avoid social and geographic border zones. Offering a feminist take on Giorgio Agamben’s concept of “bare life,” she identifies spaces where women cross beyond social limits—a house, a party, a car—into a place where danger is all but inevitable, where “the state of exception” turns into the scene of the crime. Rape is not an individual crime but the expropriation of the female body, a threat leveled against a class of potential victims that shifts the burden of staying safe onto their own internalized policing. This, Barjola claims, is the frontline for female transgression, freedom, and resistance. Drawing on Judith Butler’s work on performativity, Michel Foucault’s thinking on power, and Silvia Federici’s analysis of the witch hunt, The Sexist Microphysics of Power proposes a paradigm shift for understanding gender violence and provides the theoretical underpinnings for the current true-crime craze with its lurid repetition of sexual danger narratives. In 2021, the book received national distinction from the Spanish government for its significance in research for social transformation. The translation of this instrumental feminist text for the first time is an event for English-language readers.”
