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Naomi Alderman's The Power (2016) is a speculative fiction that imagines a dystopia in which women, enabled by the ability to generate electrical power, rule a matriarchal world order. According to Justine Jordan, the narrative is a "thought experiment" which seeks to determine how the "individual exercise of power might contribute to power relations as a whole" (2016); or, as Alderman notes, how "when the people change, the palace cannot hold" (2016, 4). Critics emphasize the problematic inversions of the fiction, noting that whilst a "galvanising new female superpower" (Armistead 2016) might offer a reprieve from reality, it is a speculation that is neither optimistic nor feminist (Steele 2016, 17). The complications of Alderman's narrative, however, are more nuanced than simple reversals of power, as its portrayals of extreme violence—both literal and symbolic—function as a strategy of resistance against cultural misogyny. It does so by literalizing those mythic archetypes associated with femininity, specifically the notion of the monstrous-feminine and its association with abject and highly sexualized imagery. By dissecting how violence is figured as central to social systems that rely on gender binaries, this paper makes two arguments: firstly, that the reversal of power in Alderman's novel creates an imagined scenario in which the full horror of current gender relations is revealed; and secondly, by reframing "female monstrosity as a source of physical power," The Power offers an image of women who are able to combat such a "culture of gender violence" (Kelly 2016, 98). Yet it is also important to observe how such an imagining is strikingly incomplete: by failing to acknowledge how the machinations of power are imbricated with questions of race and sexuality, The Power ignores the "transdemographic terrain" (Carbado 2013, 4) of identity politics. As a result, white heteronormativity is constituted and naturalized as a universal experience of womanhood, a vision of revolution which reveals how a lack of an intersectional approach to the problems of inequality "only perpetuate the rot in a different pattern" (Hoyle 2017).
Whilst published before the furor surrounding the election of President Trump or the momentum of movements such as #MeToo and Time's Up, The Power, Victoria Hoyle observes, seems not only prescient but also impossible to read in isolation from recent incarnations of...