The bodies that get in the way

BarcelonaI have read The sleeping children, ofAnthony Passeron, translated by Lluís-Anton Baulenas for La Otra Editorial, which I would vote as one of the best books of 2025 if it had not been published in 2023. Passeron writes about a family secret, the death of his uncle Désiré due to the AIDS virus in the 1980s, and links it to an excellently documented chronicle of the struggle of researchers. of thirty-six million deaths worldwide. Passeron's story also attests to the social rejection, shame and institutional inaction that condemned so many millions of people to an undignified death.

The Cameroonian philosopher Achille Mbembe developed the concepts of necropower and necropolitics, which analyse how hierarchies in power decide which lives are worth living and which can be left to die. It goes a step beyond Michel Foucault's biopolitics, which described how modern states regulate and manage the lives of individuals, and examines how certain groups are considered expendable or unworthy of protection. In the case of the AIDS crisis, institutional power decided that the sick were not a priority and that their death was not a political or social problem because, for the most part, they were homosexuals, drug addicts and sex workers. The difference in reaction to the Covid-19 pandemic is significant, in which from the outset a large amount of resources were invested in seeking care, since the population at risk, the elderly, coincided with the ageing generation of men who occupy the echelons of power. Even children and young people were forced to get vaccinated, despite not being at risk, in order to achieve an umbrella effect that would protect adults who did not want to be exposed to an experimental vaccine.

The rejection of aging bodies

In The Substance, Coralie Fargeat's body horror film starring Demi Moore, presents a radical metaphor for how society decides which bodies are valuable and which can be discarded. The protagonist, an actress in her fifties, sees her career crumble because she no longer fits the standards of beauty and youth. The film shows the rejection of aging bodies, especially in the case of women, and how the system decides which bodies deserve attention and which should be eliminated or replaced. Youth seems to be rewarded, but young people have no real power, they are just an object of consumption of a system controlled by aging men, the same ones who decide what is beautiful, who has value and who can be discarded.

There is nothing more uncomfortable for those in power than what they cannot control. When menopause arrives and women can no longer be controlled through reproduction, attempts are made to subjugate them with unattainable beauty ideals. In the case of AIDS, those who challenged the established order were allowed to die because they rejected compulsory heterosexuality, the traditional family or the logic of work as the only meaning of existence.

So much The sleeping children as The substance They try to break the silence imposed by the system and show, without censorship, the bodies that it wants to eliminate. But not only because they are no longer useful, but because, in reality, they represent a threat to its hegemony.