María Folguera called in early 2019 to offer me space in the book she was putting together: Tranquilas: Historias para ir solas por la noche (Keep Calm: Stories to Help You Walk Alone at Night). Two years earlier, I had published the Spanish edition of Rape New York (Feminist Press, 2011) and María wanted to enlist me in this new project aiming to counteract the culture of fear in which women exist. This wasn’t necessarily an easy assignment for me, since both my art practice and my moral compass require me to read all coverage of murders of women by men. Just one recent US headline involved Rex Heuermann, a sixty-year-old architect (and husband and father), who was charged with the murders of the “Gilgo Four”—Megan Waterman, Melissa Barthelemy, Amber Costello, and Maureen Brainard-Barnes—but who is suspected of killing many more young women who worked on occasion as escorts. Recently, I have begun work on a book of micro-stories of femicide entitled (in English) Mom is dead, but we are going to cure her, the title quoting a six-year-old girl who spoke to EMTs after her mother’s murder. Here is but onevdispatch:
Esther Redondo García, twenty-seven, died on May 2, 2000, from two machete wounds: one in the back while having sex with the murderer (her client), and the other in the stomach, which severed her aorta artery and cut her open from below the navel to the breastbone. The morning after a night out, he had called her, as he had done on other occasions, to come to his house in Pozuelo de Alarcón, Madrid. He was a teacher and, after degrading her body postmortem (painted insults on her skin, burned her clothes, stuffed her vagina with condoms), and after asking a student for help getting rid of the corpse, he ran away. He turned himself in a few days later.
Still, I respected María’s desire to defang some of the narratives that push women to behave in certain ways. So, for Keep Calm, I wrote about three situations of personal vulnerability: hitchhiking in the Spanish countryside, going over to a stranger’s place, and sleeping in a shelter in Bern, Switzerland. All three had resulted in sexual violence for me (of varying sorts). In each case, I had crossed metaphorical borders, doing what a decent young lady shouldn’t do. For quite a long period of time, not only did I cross those borders, I inhabited them. Pretty much everything I did was risky, I knew it, and I kept doing it because I believed it shouldn’t be a risk. I fought the war on women with my actions and, so, at the battlefront, there was me and my body. I was transformed into a non-person who, under these particular circumstances, found I resided between laws and could be sexually assaulted without the legal label of “rape.”
A bracing English translation of Nerea Barjola’s The Sexist Microphysics of Power: The Alcàsser Case and the Construction of Sexual Terror takes this concept a step further, illustrating how one can be killed without the “commission of homicide.” Barjola is a feminist social scientist in her mid-forties whose book details a case infamous in my native Spain: the rape, torture, and murder of three teenage girls (Miriam García, Toñi Gómez, and Desirée Hernández) in Alcàsser, Valencia. Barjola positions rape as politically necessary in Spain, to scare off meaningful change in women’s status. Many of the concepts and structures Barjola discusses appear in my own writing on sexual violence, not because she and I are both Spaniards, but because they are obvious patterns in any analysis of sexist violence. These patterns can be looked at according to the following components:
Border Crossing: Three girls hitchhike to a discotheque in a rural area. Barjola describes hitchhiking “as the freedom that is harshly punished and repressed”—thus a border that the girls have crossed. After crossing this border, the girls are on their own; they’re in a “no man’s land” where the rules of civilization do not apply.
Warnings: What women are told throughout their lives: don’t do this, don’t do that, don’t go out at night, and if you do, whatever happens to you is your fault.
Victim-blaming: The idea that, if you don’t do what you’re supposed to do as a woman, bad things will happen to you. Barjola refers to this as “[t]he punishment of female insubordination to patriarchal authority.”
Docile Femininity: The effort to educate women to be obedient, to put them in their place. The relentless lecturing about how women have to behave.
Conditioning: The constant molding of women by society to avoid being raped or murdered, sets of rules in place to easily shift the blame. If one is raped, it is because she has not followed these rules; therefore, she is culpable.
Wrong Place at the Wrong Time: Barjola argues that the “the sexual torture, murder, and disappearance of women is not a matter of bad luck” but “part of a political notion that constitutes the backbone, the very structure of our social system. Alcàsser is not a ‘case’ or an ‘incident’; it is itself a political regime.”
The B-World: Or, the creation of a world inside our world where what we say we are against is allowed. It can be a prison cell, a concentration camp, or La Romana, the house in which the three Alcàsser girls were brutally killed. Barjola writes, “I understand La Romana as the symbolic place where the state of exception and bare life reinstate the border and corporealize boundaries, marking the new rules for women through sexual torture.” For me, this world is the apartment where I was held hostage and raped.
The Other: The sudden conversion of a human to a non-human, half-woman and half animal, is the structure that makes torture possible. Barjola discusses this concept as “bare life”—“the potential to reduce a person to a mere animal existence.” In 2018, I created an anti-sexual assault performance piece called No violarás; the central image of the performance was a dress made of pig skin.
Don’t do this, don’t do that, don’t go out at night, and if you do, whatever happens to you is your fault.
These (and more) are outlined by Barjola as the ingredients of our rape culture and are worthwhile to enumerate. But to me, her forensic examination of the media frenzy and penal process following the disappearance and discovery of those three teenage girls—the chapter called “The Construction of a Sexual Danger Narrative”—is most profound. Barjola’s necessary analysis of how a story forms independent of the true circumstances of the event is meticulous and intense. She places the Alcàsser crimes in historical context to build her case. The murdered women came of age in the 1980s, after the death of fascist dictator Francisco Franco and amid a movement known as “La Movida”—a mix of pop culture, sex, and drugs ushered in with our newfound political freedom. La Movida was cut short in early 1990s, partly by the emergence of the AIDS crisis, but also as part of US-style “backlash”—a push to return to conservative “family values,” because a crazy, orgiastic, happy life would drag you to an early grave. Thus, the Alcàsser girls’ partying—their fun night out—was cast as the catalyst for their demise. Barjola writes that “failure to follow the rules” was the message in virtually all of the coverage at the time, and that alone “put the teenage girls in mortal danger.” She continues: “This somehow sanctioned the implicit—sexist—convention, by which three women are seen to put themselves in danger merely by being on their own in a given place at a given time.”
Some recent cases of sexual violence in Spain have inspired feminist demonstrations (such as the “wolf pack case” in 2016, where five men in San Fermines raped a young woman in an apartment hallway), but no significant protests during the Alcàsser case offered any counter-narrative, at least at the national level. (Barjola notes that “a few days after the three young women’s bodies were found, a group of young people held a walk-out and issued a press release that said, in part, ‘the lives of three young people have been snuffed out, and it isn’t coincidental that they were three young women.’”)
For me, The Sexist Microphysics of Power thrives in its middle, when Barjola’s hours of compiling, researching, dissecting, interviewing, and accounting are most evident, as is her passion for showing how blithely accounts of male violence are shrugged off. In “The Penal Process,” she quotes a prosecutor’s courtroom interrogation of one of the assailant’s brothers:
“Your brother wasn’t normally violent, was he?”
“He wasn’t violent, no.”
“But, when he wanted something and he couldn’t get it, that’s when he was violent, right?”
“No.”
“Not even then?”
“Not even then.”
“But that’s what you said on TV last night.”
“But we’re in court, not on TV.”
In spite of Barjola’s research and clear expertise, I was made uneasy throughout the book by the safe distance at which she stood in her point of view. I wish the first chapter, in which she justifies her concepts, wasn’t there. This work needs no preamble, no quoting of Foucault, no comparisons to Jack the Ripper. She quotes many women who discuss how the Alcàsser case created a “before” and “after” in how they understand their sexuality, space, and freedom. Interestingly, she never describes her own emotional state, her own sexual terror—whatever it was that motivated her to write the book. How did she feel? In a 2018 interview with the Spanish newspaper El Salto, she said, “Twenty years later, I have had the opportunity to analyze and give new meaning to a story that was terrifying for me.” Yet in her book, her own terror remains buried. In the same interview, Barjola answered a question about the mission of her book by quickly pivoting from speaking as a woman to the perspective of a researcher: “The main thing is that [The Sexist Microphysics of Power] gives a reason to a terror that a generation of young women live under.” She, like me, was part of that “generation of young women” reminded of their vulnerability by this case, yet Barjola discusses that terror as an academic observer—from a position of authority. Her criticism of the microphysics of power, written from her position of power, troubled me. I wish there was a way for women to write about things that matter without losing our authority. I wish we were not punished
