Female Bodies as Anti-Patriarchal Weapons in The Power: Reimaging Power Dynamics and Gender Roles in the TV Series Adaptation of Naomi Alderman’s Acclaimed Novel

Abstract

Extremizing patriarchal tendencies and prejudices, most of feminist dystopias depict women’s condition in nightmarish realities, illustrating repressive and sexist systems that cancel their identities and their freedom, as in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) or Christina Dalcher’s Vox (2018). Based on the acclaimed novel written in 2016 by Naomi Alderman, the 2023 Amazon series The Power reverts this trope and builds a world where women possess an unrestrainable power: they can emit electricity from their hands thanks to a new organ, the skein. Their new ability completely subverts the power dynamics in society and annihilates patriarchy and its millennial oppression, but the results are not completely utopian. The proposed paper aims to analyze three main topics: 1) the representation of women’s roles, identities and bodies in the series, 2) the narrative and the techniques of control, manipulation, and oppression used by patriarchal/matriarchal dystopian powers, and 3) the comparison between the series and the novel and the relations between the plot and the actual socio-political reality.