The Sexist Microphysics of Power

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 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, Bereja 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 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. 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.