The Sexist Microphysics of Power

by Nerea Barjola

ISBN: 9781849355506

Published: 2024-05-07

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