University of Sussex

MA Conflict, Security and Development

Student Id number: 178368
Word count: 4300

Gender creates power, power creates gender

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 One is not born a woman, but rather becomes one.

—Simone de Beauvoir (1999)

Introduction

The social construction of gender not only produces differences between men’s and women’s
individualities and performance, it also produces gender inequality by creating power and
subordination into gendered interactions (Lorber, 2010). We have lived in a world dominated
by men since Eve supposedly made Adam eat the forbidden fruit. The current inequalities and
tangible disparities between women and man have resulted in years and years of dominance,
patriarchy and, power. The essentialist vision that dominates the current world posits that; the
image of women is based on the inherited perception that women are maternal, emotional and
peace-loving. Years have gone by and changes have been made, but there is always something
missing, from Saudi Arabia to the United States, women are dominated, suffer from violence
and inequalities are around them (Sjoberg, 2007).
This paper will crucially analyse the novel of Naomi Alderman called The Power. The
book was released for the first time in 2016, therefore, being able to provide a contemporary
vision of the current gender relations and the problems that accompany them. The book gives
an insight into what would happen if the gender power physically flipped, what Alderman
imagines is a world in which women develop an electric power in their collarbone, called the
skein. This can produce a deadly electrical charge that presents them with the ability to play
with men, debilitating or exterminating them, or just shaking them for sexual pleasure.
The author posits the following questions: Would women be better in ruling the world?
Would they be more merciful and fair as essentialist theories postulate? Naomi Alderman
draws upon post- structural feminism by stating that the essentialist traits of gender are non-
existent (Butler, 1999), and in this case, these are overruled by power. Power goes before
gender, sex and everything else, the use of power, just because they can. The destabilisation of
the gendered order is rapid and severe; the social and cultural collectives at all levels, from
religion to nation-sate, family and criminal organizations, are forced to re-evaluate the
patriarchal power dynamics that so completely underlie society, culture and politics. To
provide clarity, the essay will be divided into three sections. The first section will aim to
deconstruct the gender essentialism and masculinities to understand how in the new world
created by Alderman, the skein alters the relations of power. The second part will make a

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critical evaluation of the absence of an intersectional framework by providing two different
approaches; first, by analysing the current politics and social relations and secondly, by
exploring how this new power privileges some women more than other, since the power is not
completely uniform for everyone. Finally, a critical approach of the novel will analyse the fact
that the world in which we live, is rooted in a patriarchy that goes beyond only physical
characteristics.
Alderman (2016) inspects the emergence and influence of the power through the
experiences of four characters. Allie, a biracial teenager in a violent foster home in Alabama,
who reinvents herself as faith leader Mother Eve; Roxy, the daughter of a British drug lord,
who first uncovers her power when her mother is killed by a rival gang; Tunde, a male Nigerian
journalist who explores the consequences of the power around the world and Margot, mayor
of an unnamed city in the United States, the only adult among the characters. While Allie, Roxy
and Tunde are all teenagers, or considered young adults, Margot is a mid-career politician.
Through Tunde, we get to explore what is happening around the world; through Allie, we see
the expression of power around a new religion focused on women; through Margot, we see the
role of politics and its link with the military industry compound; while through Roxy, we see
how organized crime uses this new world to leverage into business scenarios. The book leaves
the reader with one question: to dismantle the patriarchy and the social hierarchical structure
around it, is utter destruction needed? According to Alderman, it is. The book defies every
social construction around the binary notion of gender, but it reinforces the relations of power,
just taking power from the male identified bodies to female.1
The first section will explore thoroughly the ways in which the author challenges the notion of
gender essentialism.

I. The deconstruction of gender essentialism and masculinities

Essentialist accounts of men and masculinity imply that there is a certain naturalness to male
aggression engrained in society and military (Withworth, 2004). As Elizabeth Grosz (1995)
argues, gender essentialism is the estimation that the features defined as women's essence are
shared collectively by all women at all times. It suggests a limit of the distinctions and
probabilities of alteration. In the same way, the debate over gender essentialism dictates that

1
To read more about the book: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/nov/02/the-power-naomi-alderman-
review

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male bodies have an inherent masculinity, which in this sense means that they have an innate
attraction to aggression and violence (Grosz, 1995). According to Fukuyama (1998) since the
vast majority of the world’s soldiers are male, so are most of the police, generals, admirals and
politicians – then human males are genetically predetermined to be killers and hunters and
there is a supposedly intrinsic distinctive characteristic that men possessed around violence. A
similar argument is posited by socio-biologists Lionel Tiger and Robin Fox (1972), they
contend that if all the powerful and mighty military posts in the world were taken over by
women, there would be no war. By this view, women are inherently more peaceful and
biologically given, and they are more nurturing and more in touch with the cycle of life
(Withworth, 2006). Which in certain occasions, these characteristics are brought to the public
sphere of decision – making, governance and war, because there is a need for this ‘gentleness’.
Hence, the claim that one of the main biological features of women is their supposed tenderness
and, for that reason they should be brought to the international arena only serves to reproduce,
a world based on gendered binaries and power hierarchies (Tobias & Jean Bethke Elshtain,
1990).
The deconstruction of masculinities and gender essentialism in the book starts at the
moment when women realize they have a skein, almost every one of the qualities that
supposedly define what a man is, start to be unravel. As the relations of power start to change
because of the skein, the supposedly innate masculinities start to diminish and within a
framework of ten years the meaning of what a man is loses its sense. In contrast to what occurs
in the book, those who believe in gender essentialism would suggest that, if the imaginary book
created by Alderman would occur, then the violent potential of the skein would be hindered by
the natural femenine tenderness and women would not abuse this new-found power (Ditum,
2016).
As the book advances, a sexism of women towards men appears and violence perpetrated
by women towards men rises as the use of the skein becomes a weapon of torture and revenge
for all of the years of oppression. Women become perpetrators, they commit sexual assault and
take the power from men in a violent manner. Contradicting completely the argument of
essentialist theorists of women as peaceful by nature and acknowledging that in fact, masculine
and feminine traits are socially constructed, and that genetic masculinity does not exist, but it
has been socially fabricated over time.
To one extent the scholars Fukuyama (1998), Tiger and Fox (1972) gender essentialist theorists
are right as men after all, will not relinquish their position of power to women easily
(Withworth, 2006). They would not give control easily, once women were fearful of men, now

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men have to find ways to fight women’s new power – creating laws that restrain women find
ways to fight with them, trying to create defenses that will allow them to survive the electric
shocks, stores of heavy artillery to overcome women’s sparks, among others (Alderman, 2016).
Nevertheless, the reasoning the obstinacy of men to to gain back their power is not accurate, it
has nothing to do with the supposedly biological trait of males, as the book explains, but it has
more to do with the power relations and domination that they have exercised over women for
decades. The assessment of Alderman is fascinating in the sense of explaining how desperately
the powerful retain their privilege, and how much force is needed to overthrow a hegemony as
deeply rooted as the patriarchy (Fallon, 2017). Later in the book, Roxy explains that
"sometimes a bloke is better at that than a woman — less threatening; they're better at
diplomacy." And by that point in the book we comprehend that the main features of what
masculinity meant are entirely overturned by this new power, even though one of the
fundamental critiques of this paper is that the author imagines this change in a frame time of
ten years, overlooking centuries of exclusion and oppression (see more in section III).
The unreality of gender performances and roles is demonstrated by the facility in which
‘feminine’ features – such as emotional behaviour, nurturing personalities and the sexual
double standard – are passed over to men once they are overpowered by women. Even though
it is possible to argue that many of these things, such as the ability to be caring and supportive,
are desirable, they have also represented an unequal burden of labour for women (Tisdall,
2017). The subordination of women in global politics has impact in their social and political
options, thus women just like men are capable of violence, as women’s freedom develop, so
will their violence (Sjoberg, 2007). Taking into consideration these aspects in which the book
is drawn, the next section will argue that there is a lack of commitment to the intersection
between gender, race and class. Therefore, the aim is to explain the approaches that are not
taken into account when constructing this dystopia. The author leaves fundamental elements
that look into the positionality and privilege of women and their connection with other aspects,
such as race and class.

II. From We to I, no intersectionality

This section will analyse the concept of intersectionality and how there was a shift between a
sisterhood notion between female characters to a more individualistic one. Consequently, an
analysis of how this individualistic endeavour creates a deficiency of an intersectional
approach. This section will outline two critical approaches to the lack of engagement with

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intersectionality that the author makes in regard to race, class and non-binary identities, and of
how some women are not able to convey this power are oppressed and left behind.
As the book envisions our contemporary time – with our conflicts, history and gender
politics – it becomes convoluted by the unforeseen widespread manifestation of “electrostatic
power” in women. The power is diverse in its intensity but is almost uniform in its spread to
anyone with two X chromosomes, even though the book mentions only briefly that some male
identified bodies that have it, it does not go further to explain the consequences or experiences
of them. There are differences in their capacity to control and direct it within women, but the
result is still an immense, a systemic turmoil of gender dynamics across the globe (El-Mohtar,
2017). Nevertheless, one of the main weaknesses of Alderman’s (2016) argument is related to
the narrow focus on how power acts different on people and shapes the world. There is an
absence of almost complete engagement with intersectionality.
At the beginning of the novel, it appeared that the fact of being a female and having the
ability to convey power was enough to be part of the so-called sisterhood. This idea of a global
sisterhood can be understood through classic second-wave feminism. By the 1960s, the idea
that in a patriarchal society woman share collective experiences, and therefore through a
sharing of their experiences with one another, they can produce knowledge about their own
oppression (Snyder, 2008). Nevertheless – in the same way –the second wave of feminism
overlooked the stories and experiences of women of colour, working-class women, and non-
cisgender women. The novel disregards how all of these experiences are entrenched and shape
the reality of each woman individually and according to their own personal experiences.
Therefore, this “global sisterhood” does not apply for all, but just for some.
The concept of intersectionality is vaguely portrayed in the novel. In essence, the
intersectionality theoretical framework explains that gender, racial categories, ethnicity and
social class cannot look at one status alone (Crenshaw, 1991). Intersectionality is an approach
of understanding and exploring the convolution in the world, in people and in human
experiences. The events of society and politics cannot be understood as shaped by only one
factor (Hill Collins, 2016). Their interaction is interrelated, together they construct a social
position, and some of these positions are more oppressive because they are the result of
multiple spaces of domination (Lorber, 2010). Nevertheless, the representation of the book is
that the power given to female bodies would somehow obliterate all of the years of privilege
and entitlement experienced by some women, creating a greater force and bond between all
women, as the second-wave feminists of the 1960s would have argued.

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 Moreover, the author only engages slightly with how gendered experiences are impacted
and nuanced by race, sexuality and disability. The novel seems unaware of how power is
complicated by its unequal distribution within genders, or by white, cisgender, straight
privilege. The character Tunde, who is black-African, and character Allie, who is bi-racial, do
not reflect at all on how these effects their experiences of a post skein world. Wealth and
poverty are also absent from the text as it is not clear, for example, how poor girls in Margot’s
America might have a different experience to her own daughters (Hoyle, 2017). These
examples can be translated to the contemporary world; when a woman of colour from a poor
background suffers a double discrimination, for being their gender and their race; a woman
who is not able to carry children or female immigrants who are doubly neglected by authorities
– their positionality and burden are greater, they are not only mistreated because of their gender,
but because they are poor and black and brown. These women enjoy fewer or no privileges and
their positionality is fundamentally different from the average white, cisgender woman. The
skein becomes just another element to evaluate white women’s positionality and privilege,
instead of a component that eliminates that positionality.
As the book goes on, the author focused on how women that have less power or do not
have a skein at all suffer and engage with this exclusion. For example, Margot’s eldest
daughter, Jocelyn, has a physical condition that makes it difficult for her to use her power.
Jocelyn is oppressed because her power is not constant. Therefore, the consequence for this is
a feeling of disempowerment that is translated in shame and a feeling of unworthiness
(Alderman, 2016). At the end of the novel, Jocelyn gets pressured by their colleagues to hurt a
man to prove her power, even though, her intention was only to damage him, she ends up
killing him because she is not able to control her power. Jocelyn’s inconsistent power becomes
an element in which she needs to prove her “womanhood” to be included in this new world.
The inclusion of Jocelyn’s character and story cannot make up for the fact that material
differences in other character’s race and positionalities are not explored or considered,
therefore highlighting the fundamental lack of intersectional storytelling in the novel.
The skein becomes something that “makes a woman” as in previous times in the novel, being
a woman would be having an able body and being able to carry children. While reading the
experiences and exclusion that women posit for not having a skein, the speech of Sojourner
Truth’s “Ain’t I a woman?” comes to mind, which highlights the inequalities within feminism
(Brah & Phoenix, 2004). The new power is supposedly uniform, the fact of not being able to
convey power makes them less woman in the same sense that, when white feminism fights for
women, they do not take into account the divergent experiences of women of colour or working

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class. As pointed out by Marcia Rice (1990), white women, who usually dictate the feminist
discussion hardly question if their perception on women’s experience is true to the one lived
perspective of women as collective group. In the same way, the privileges of this new power
are not for all women, but for only a few and even though, the power would not be the only
characteristic of positionality among women, but it intersects with several other features that
will determinate their privilege and position in this new world. The next section will make a
critical analysis of how the power produced an immediate change into the gender and social
structures by only acknowledging the physical aspects as a way of oppression. Finally, an
argument about how the author shifted the power from one gender to another, but without really
deconstructing the binaries between female and male.

III. The cosmic revolution

This section will argue that the representation of Alderman’s (2016) imaginary world only
serves to reinforce a binary representation of gender, since the author just shifted power from
one gender to another, but without really deconstructing the binaries of male and female
identified bodies. An analysis of the simplification of this change of power will be explored.
Alderman’s (2016) overturn of gender stereotypes is successful in many aspects: the
representation of reverse sexism, the evidence of the use of force just for revenge and the vivid
experiences of men as the weaker gender.
In Alderman’s creation, the supposed features that represent gender relationships and
performances are overturned from the start: “Boys dressing as girls to seem more powerful.
Girls dressing as boys to shake off the meaning of the power, or to leap on the unsuspecting,
wolf in sheep’s clothing.” (Alderman, 2016, p. 70) This phrase states that the roles of gender
power changed right away, even after all the years of domination, women take on the new
gender role. As Lorber (2010) argues, the contemporary structures and actions are built into
the theory of social construction. Socially patterned individuals and institutions reinforce and
reproduce themselves. People constantly maintain and reinforce the gender norms and
expectations that are built into work and family structures. Therefore, even when they are
shifted, the main patterns of the gendered structures are extremely difficult to change.
Alderman’s analysis is correct in the sense of understanding how physical power in our
contemporary society works and how this change could be represented. It would create a
change in the relations between genders by positing more power and physical strength to
women, giving them an advantage. Nonetheless, one of the critiques of this essay toward the

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book is that, a role-reversing shift in power would – of course –overturn gender roles, but the
author put it as a nearly immediate change, despite the duration of conditioning, and established
patriarchal power structures (Fallon, 2017). Hence, the argument fails to understand the
established domination within the structure in a patriarchal society.
However, there is something fundamentally absent in her vision of a matriarchal world, it is in
some respects, over-simplified and some characters – as will be seen at the end – like Allie
became even megalomaniacal. In physical terms, women are not merely subjugated as a sex
class because they can be sexually assaulted or because on average they tend to be less
physically dominant; but because they bear and often nurse children. The novel portrays that,
despite their physical new subordination to women, men still will not have to deal with
unwanted pregnancies, or pregnancy as a result of rape; and they would not have to take time
from work at all to have biological children of their own. This means that the nature of their
oppression is not the simple reversal of women’s oppression, but a different kind of
disempowerment than the one portrayed in the book. The feminist connotation of this novel
clearly challenges its readers to re-evaluate some of the features of modern society’s treatment
of gender. Once women have discovered their power, it soon becomes clear that they are using
it extensively: ‘parents are telling their boys not to go out alone, not to stray too far’ (Alderman,
2016, p. 21) this is a familiar warning for women, but never for men, is a threat in an
unaccustomed context.
For example, the book narrates that in Moldova, a male leader dies and is replaced by his wife,
Tatiana Moskalev, who seems eager to rise to power, and who rapidly declares the country
“The Republic of Women”. As the book envisages, it does not take long for her to become
intoxicated with power, to the point that she forces a male servant to eat broken glass as a
punishment for interrupting her (Schaub, 2017). At the same time, in India, a country renowned
for violence towards women, a gender revolution is taking place. Women have finally the
power to say: "Now they will know that they are the ones who should not walk out of their
houses alone at night. They are the ones who should be afraid."
The two characteristics discussed in this section, the change of power from male bodies
to women bodies and the simplification of the immediate cosmic revolution that the skein
caused, could only lead to one ending: an apocalypse. The author generates a final question:
Why do people use their powers to hurt others? The answer is, because they can, as the narrative
insinuates: “that is the only answer there ever is.” The last argument of Alderman is that, gender
neither guarantees nor precludes power or the ability to use it to help or hurt. In this radical
representation, the novel contemplates that to completely eradicate the gendered structure of

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power, there is a need to create a new world from start. Nevertheless, they are not really
eradicating the gendered structure, but transferring the power from one to another. There’s only
one answer, Allie finally realises: An apocalyptic war that will shatter all the existing norms,
institutions, governments and other structures built by and for men (Fallon, 2017). “The women
will die just as much as the men will if we bomb ourselves back to the Stone Age,” someone
warns her. “And then we’ll be in the Stone Age,” she responds. “And then there will be five
thousand years of rebuilding, five thousand years where the only thing that matters is: can you
hurt more, can you do more damage, can you instil fear ... And then the women will
win.”(Alderman, 2016, pp. 312–314) The only way to end the patriarchy isn’t an incremental
shift, a demand for rights, a few combats, but at utter Armageddon (Schaub, 2017). As this
book represents power and hegemony of gender instead of equality, then the only suitable
approach is to end the world and then completely destroy it and renew it.

Conclusion

The examination of the book allowed us to explore the convincing arguments and analyse the
faults of the author from a gender lens perspective. The first section explored how the book
challenged the essentialist theory by examining a world in which physical power shifts from
male identified bodies to female identified bodies. The author portrayed reverse abuses and
mistreats that women suffer in our contemporary society, and as the book continues,
masculinities changed completely. The belief that aggression and violence are innate part of
men’s features is completely unravelled when these same behaviours start being reproduced
by women when the skein arrives. Consequently, positing the assumption that aggression and
violence does not know gender, but power; it has the influence to corrupt people, regardless
their gender. The second section constructed a critical evaluation of the concept of
intersectionality and the absence of this approach in the book. As seen above, the author failed
to represent how diverse the experiences of women of colour, working-class women, and non-
cisgender women are, amongst others. In the same sense, it explains the consequences of the
unequal distribution of the skein and the experiences of the woman and girls who do not have
power, or it is inconsistent. An element that novel does not argues is that, the skein became
another characteristic that determines one’s positionality in society instead of being an element
that eliminates that positionality. The final section analyses the shift of power from one gender
to another, without the deconstruction of socially constructed and conditioned binaries and the
immediacy in which the author destroys the gender structures. Superficially, the novel explores

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 the dynamics power in a dystopian world where gender roles are inverted, but beneath the
surface it reveals how power corrupts unrespectable of gender.

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