‘Acheronta movebo’

Abstract

This paper addresses Naomi Alderman's The Power (2016), a (post‐)feminist dystopia where gender roles are reversed after what is called ‘the Cataclysm’. Being victims of male chauvinism, young girls develop the ability to emit an electrical charge through their hands, ‘the power’, which they use against their potential aggressors. One of these girls, Allie, uses it to start a violent female theocracy, not less violent and problematic than the patriarchy it fights against. The Power puts forward a stimulating debate on the justifiability and legitimacy of violence to combat violence. The novel, the paper contends, recasts the poetics and politics of 1990s cyberfeminism to meet new concerns, particularly the discourses of violence and otherness in the context of the twenty‐first‐century political crisis. To prove it, Rosie Braidotti's analysis of cyberfeminism is addressed first, to delve later into how The Power updates Slavoj Žižek's (Violence. London, UK: Profile Books, 2009), Walter Benjamin's (Selected writings. Vol. 1, 1913–1926. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996, pp. 249–251) and Hannah Arendt's (On violence, New York, NY: Harcourt, 1970; The origins of totalitarianism. New York, NY: Harcourt, 1976; On revolution. New York, NY: Penguin Books 1977) conceptions of violence and revolutionary rage.