The Power of Refusing to Stay Silent

by: Lula Męcińska , October 9, 2025

Holding up a mirror to the current cultural obsession with true crime, Nerea Barjola’s book, The Sexist Microphysics of Power (2024), is a feminist dissection of the role the media have played in perpetuating and reinforcing sexual terror. Referring to the 1992 abduction and murder of three young women, Desiree Hernandez, Miriam Garcia, and Antonia Gomez, which took place in the Spanish municipality of Alcásser, Barjola employs the term ‘enforced disappearance’ to reveal the political nature of that crime, its subsequent media reporting, and the court trial. The phrase helps the author establish the dominant discourse perpetuated in Spanish media accounts of violence against women and how it obscured the social dimension of such crimes by focusing on ‘singularity.’ Through her meticulous unpicking of the mechanisms used by social institutions—including media, specialised experts, and the justice system that played a significant role in the follow-up to the abduction and murder in Alcásser—Barjola unveils their sexist inclinations. The importance of this book cannot be overstated. As a feminist and an academic, I read it with much interest, primarily because it poignantly and convincingly denounces the vicarious victimisation of women of my generation.

The book is undoubtedly recommended for advanced higher education students of politics, gender, and media studies. Sexual danger narratives and sexual terror are still prolific. It is only fitting to focus this review on the way Barjola addresses the collective wound and seeks to redefine it from a woman’s perspective. She claims that institutionalised discourses often seek to extinguish women’s resistance to patriarchy by claiming ownership of women’s bodies to strip them of agency, by creating a hostile social and political environment.

As Barjola reminds us, feminists and critical criminologists are more than familiar with the ‘genre’ of the Alcásser story. They have long argued that the reporting of crimes against women often positions all women as ‘potential victims.’ Furthermore, their critical work considered the impact of over-reporting of crimes of a sexual nature, and the fear that it might instil (see Jewkes 2015: 55; Soothil & Walby 1991). Neither the use of drastic visuals (Greer 2007) nor the focus on victims is neutral. As Pamela Davies asserts, ‘visible gendered representations of victims become the gendered representations’ (2011: 41). Sexism and sexual violence are deeply embedded in social and cultural institutions, including the media. Dominant media around the world tend to perpetuate ‘myths’ of sexual violence, blaming and objectifying the victims, while individualising perpetrators as ‘monstrous’ (Buiten & Salo 2007). In other words, underneath the ways of thinking and speaking about sexual violence lie specific institutional processes (Temkin & Krahé, 2008).

In this book, the ‘sexual danger narrative’ is traced back to Judith Wolkowitz’s (1992) analysis of the Ripper case. As Barjola argues, a similar sexual danger narrative, ingrained in the Spanish media, upholds institutionalised misogyny that serves to keep women ‘in check.’ Its large-scale escalation at the time when the girls were murdered in Alcásser was by no means accidental. In fact, the crime coincided with the then-recent change in the legal classification of rape in Spain, from a crime against decency to an offence against the person involved. This legal amendment was in response to relentless feminist campaigning. Given this context, Barjola observes that the dominant Spanish media reaction to the girls’ murder reveals reactionary attempts to undermine the successes of the feminist movement—a staged backlash against feminism in the country.

The author follows Silvia Federici’s consideration of the widespread patriarchal narrative denigration of women, which forms an integral part of a broader masculinist political project; Federici, in turn, provides a powerful introduction to the book. In line with Foucault, the author also claims that the spectacle of sexually tortured women’s bodies is key to sustaining patriarchal hierarchy. The detailed descriptions of abuse, in the news and in their ‘true crime’ variants, mainly through their viscerality, serve to obscure the broader social responsibility for the harms of violence against women.

Barjola is a feminist writer, activist, and scholar, and her reading of the Alcásser case is decisively political. The book is a published version of her doctoral study from 2014. Its 2018 Spanish edition received the 2021 Menina Prize for its contribution to social transformation. While the publication has been critically appraised for its detailed analysis of the case study, this is only a small part of what the book achieves. In the initial chapters, Barjola traces the development of the social narratives around the Alcásser case, from the local outpouring of care and solidarity to the ultimate media feeding frenzy, where sensationalism and competition prevailed. Later, she follows the stages of enforced disappearance, search for and discovery of the bodies, leaked autopsy reports, and the trial itself. Offering a detailed analysis of specific media content, she demonstrates how the story was moulded into a cautionary tale, a disciplinary tool aimed at the feminist movement in Spain, which had been making demands for emancipation from the oppressive political regime, whose operations were reinforced by patriarchal institutions during the Spanish transition to democracy.

The ultimate spectacle of the Alcásser trial became, as Barjola states, ‘a serial that society at large [was] hooked on’ (175), creating a ‘fan’ dynamic, the didactics of which spilt through print publications, including books and online debates, forever re-victimising the girls under the veneer of professionalism and/or ‘care.’ This point is further developed in the Epilogue, which deals with the depiction of the case in a recent Netflix documentary. Barjola draws on politico-philosophical ‘heavyweights,’ such as Agamben, Butler, Federici, and Foucault, using the framework of their ideas as analytical concepts without compromising and twisting their meanings or turning them into shorthand. This makes The Sexist Microphysics of Power valuable but demanding reading. To appreciate these sections, the reader needs to engage with the critical jargon.

In the final part of the book, the author focuses on the women’s responses to the Alcásser case. Here, using testimonials, Barjola manages to turn the dominant narrative inside out, concretely exposing what was forced out of the public discourse. In media reports, there has been no silence about the most painful details of the case, and no respect for the three young women whose re-victimisation played out even after their deaths. The book addresses the consequences the case bore for a generation of women who suffered the effects of this narrative of sexual terror. Barjola augments these voices, unveiling the collective social responsibility for the harms of violence against women. As she argues, to make the case ‘unsayable’—to coin a euphemism—contributes to its glorification. She states, ‘I refuse to adore in silence any representation, discourse or narrative about sexual danger’ (199). When women are deprived of an opportunity for collective expression of grief, pain, and anger, the transformational power of cases such as Alcásser is curtailed, precluding discussion about sexual violence in society. The dominant version, limiting sexual violence to the isolated cases, prevails.

In the interviews, women sometimes find themselves unable to express how they were affected. Yet, they describe the embodied effects the media narrative had on them and how it has lodged itself in them through a perception of ‘lack’ that requires a male presence, revealing the intended target of the mediated maelstrom. The edifice of the patriarchal narrative established ‘sexist truth and knowledge’ (245) with the intended motivation of limiting women’s freedom. It shifted the blame from perpetrators to the ‘youth,’ telling girls to live in fear, and boys to ‘protect’ and govern women’s bodies; and thus, it propped up a sexist political regime, one that thrives on the planted terror, and through which ‘Alcásser does not stop happening’ (249).

In summary, Barjola proposes that the Alcásser case was a political murder, one which needs action in response. If the function of its narrative is to restrict women from owning their body politics, the only way to oppose it is to pay no heed to the boundary. In the end, Barjola calls for women’s mobilisation from repression to expression, to turn cases such as the one in Alcásser from symbols of oppression to seeds of revolt.