The Sexist Microphysics of Power (eBook)

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 Alcsser in Valencia, Spain while on their way to a nightclub, in acase 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 ourcultural fascination with the harm done to womens bodies.The graphic rehearsal of the details in news and media fuels cautionary tales of sexual danger that induce in women amental 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 frontlinefor female transgression, freedom, and resistance.Offering a feminist take on Giorgio Agambens 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.TheSexist Microphysics of Powerbuilds onJudith Butlers work on performativity, Michel Foucaults thinking on the day-to-day operations of power, and Silvia Federici's analysis of the witch hunt topropose 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.