THE SEXIST MICROPHYSICS OF POWER

A groundbreaking feminist text that frames our obsession with true crime as a form of sexual terror.

In 1992, three teenage girls went missing from the small town of Alcàsser in Valencia, Spain while on their way to a nightclub, in a case whose strangeness and brutality continues to draw popular speculation decades later. Feminist theorist Nerea Barjola retraces the high-profile search to find them and the media frenzy of the ensuing trial to explore our cultural fascination with the harm done to women's bodies. The graphic rehearsal of the details in news and media fuels cautionary tales of sexual danger that induce in women a mental map of places they can and cannot go, the activities they dare not do. 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 argues, is the frontline for female transgression, freedom, and resistance. Offering a feminist take on Giorgio Agamben's concept of bare life, this riveting case study identifies spaces where women cross beyond social limitsa house, a party, a carinto a place where danger is all but inevitable, where the state of exception turns into the scene of the crime. The Sexist Microphysics of Power builds on Judith Butler's work on performativity, Michel Foucault's thinking on the day-to-day operations of power, and Silvia Federici's analysis of the witch hunt to propose a paradigm shift in our understanding of the systemic impact of gender violence and of a culture the relishes in its lurid repetition. In 2021, the Spanish government awarded the book a national distinction for the significance of its research for social transformation. Nerea Barjola (Santurtzi, 1980) is a writer, researcher, trainer, and consultant specialising in the analysis of sexual violence and its representations. She holds a PhD in Feminism and Gender from the Universidad del País Vasco, and a degree in Political Science and Administration. She also holds the title of Equality Agent. Her academic work focuses on representations of sexual violence and how they determine or coerce women's practices. She published the essay Microfísica Sexista del poder. El caso Alcàsser y la construcción del Terror sexual (Virus, 2018). The publication is a story about sexual terror in the 90s and aims to resignify Alcàsser's crime as a political narrative that had a huge impact on women's lives. In this same line of work, she has participated in several publications and contributed different articles and research studies, including Placer y peligro: politizando el debate sobre la violencia sexual , Aquí estamos. Puzzle de un momento feminista, (Akal, 2019) and Genova Per noi, Tranquilas. Historias para ir solas por las noches (Lumen, 2019). Currently, she combines the writing of essays with different work related to equality policies, and also provides advice and script analysis with a gender perspective for film producers. In 2021 her book, Microfísica Sexista del poder, translated into English, received the 2021 Menina Prize, awarded by the Government Delegation Against Gender Violence in the category of "work of social transformation", for generating a new paradigm of understanding sexual violence.