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How The Power Fails to Imagine a Feminist Future

Naomi Alderman’s The Power begins with a premise designed to unsettle familiar stories about gender: girls and women develop the biological ability to generate electricity, while boys and men become physically vulnerable. The television adaptation, released by Prime Video in 2023, turns that reversal into a glossy global drama about fear, authority and social collapse.

Its central question is compelling. If power moved into the hands of women, would the world become more equal, or would existing systems of domination simply acquire new rulers? Yet the series often treats feminist politics as a question of who gets to use violence. It imagines gender reversal more confidently than it imagines liberation.

For Australian viewers, the series arrives in a media culture shaped by Wentworth, The Handmaid’s Tale, reality television and public debates about gendered violence. Its ideas may resonate in Sydney boardrooms, Melbourne activist circles or regional communities far from streaming industry centres. Still, the show’s narrow framework leaves much of feminist politics unexplored.

A Reversal Is Not A Revolution

The series understands that changing who holds physical power does not automatically dismantle hierarchy. As women discover their abilities, institutions respond with panic, exploitation and attempts at control. Governments, religious organisations and wealthy men all try to contain the new force.

That setup could support a sharp examination of patriarchy as a system rather than a collection of individual bad men. Instead, the story repeatedly returns to spectacular confrontations. Electrical shocks, military threats and public displays of dominance become the visual language of political change. Structural transformation is reduced to a contest over who can hurt whom.

This is a familiar weakness in speculative fiction about gender. Reversing the positions of oppressor and oppressed can expose the machinery of power, but it can also leave that machinery intact. The world changes hands without changing its values.

The Show Confuses Women With Feminism

The women in The Power are diverse in age, class and temperament, but the narrative does not always give their differences political weight. Margot’s campaign, Allie’s religious movement and Roxy’s association with organised crime suggest competing futures. Their stories could become a sustained debate about justice, coercion and collective responsibility.

Instead, the series often treats female characters as symbols of possible outcomes. One woman represents democratic reform, another spiritual authority and another revenge. Their personal choices matter, yet the political structures surrounding them remain thin. Feminism becomes an atmosphere of female visibility rather than a programme for redistributing land, labour, safety and care.

That distinction matters. A feminist future cannot be measured by the number of women in government, police forces or corporate offices. Australia has already seen women lead major institutions while women continue to face sexual harassment, unequal pay and domestic violence. Representation without accountability can easily reproduce the old order in different bodies.

Violence Becomes The Default Political Language

The Power treats the new ability as a metaphor for sexual violence, bodily autonomy and the fear that accompanies social change. It is an understandable choice, particularly in a culture where women are routinely taught to assess danger before entering a car, walking home or reporting abuse.

But the adaptation leans so heavily on danger that it struggles to imagine power as something other than force. Women gain the capacity to punish, intimidate and kill, while less visible forms of collective power receive little attention. Care networks, unions, public education, mutual aid and legal organising rarely receive the same dramatic energy as an uprising.

For Australian audiences, this imbalance is especially noticeable against ongoing conversations about family violence and the findings of the National Plan to End Violence against Women and Children. Safety cannot be created by arming the people most at risk and waiting for the hierarchy to reverse. It requires housing, income security, culturally safe services, accessible justice and long-term prevention.

Race And Class Remain Underdeveloped

The show gestures towards a global story, moving between North America, Eastern Europe and the Middle East. Yet its understanding of race and class often remains secondary to its gender binary. Women do not experience sudden power in the same way when they are wealthy politicians, undocumented workers, prisoners or members of communities targeted by the state.

This gap is significant in an Australian context. First Nations women face particular forms of state surveillance, incarceration and violence, shaped by colonisation and ongoing inequality. A story about a new bodily power would need to ask who is believed, who is monitored, whose actions are labelled threatening and who is protected from retaliation.

Class also determines whether a new ability becomes freedom or another resource controlled by employers and governments. A woman with secure housing and political influence has choices unavailable to a casual worker, a refugee or someone dependent on an abusive partner. The series recognises hierarchy, but it does not consistently follow those hierarchies through its imagined future.

Technology Does Not Deliver Liberation

The electrical ability in The Power is treated as a biological discovery, though its consequences quickly become technological and economic. States seek weapons, corporations seek control and media organisations seek spectacle. The show is strongest when it reveals how quickly capitalism absorbs a threat and turns it into an asset.

It is less convincing when it implies that bodily transformation itself can produce political consciousness. The ability gives women leverage, but leverage is not solidarity. People can share a physical trait and still disagree about borders, prisons, religion, wealth or the use of force.

That distinction is visible in Australia’s technology debates, from facial recognition and workplace monitoring to online abuse and platform moderation. Tools do not arrive with feminist ethics attached. Their effects depend on ownership, regulation and collective decisions about whose freedom matters.

Imagining A Future Beyond Reversal

A stronger adaptation would spend less time asking whether women would become violent and more time examining how communities might reorganise daily life. Its speculative world could make room for feminist institutions, Indigenous sovereignty, disability justice, queer kinship and economic democracy. These are less visually immediate than a lightning strike, but they offer a richer account of social change.

The series still contains valuable tensions. It shows how quickly the oppressed can be encouraged to imitate the oppressor, how institutions protect themselves and how liberation can be redirected into domination. Its failure lies in stopping at that warning. A feminist future needs imagination as well as suspicion.

What A More Radical Adaptation Would Centre

The most provocative question in The Power is not whether women would abuse authority. History already provides enough evidence that anyone can reproduce oppressive systems when institutions reward domination. The sharper question is what social arrangements could make domination less necessary, less profitable and less protected.

That is where the television adaptation falls short. It dramatises the transfer of power without fully imagining the abolition of the conditions that make power abusive. Viewers can push the conversation further by reading the novel alongside feminist, Indigenous and queer political writing, discussing the series beyond its shocks, and supporting media that treats liberation as collective work rather than a change in who holds the weapon.