Narratives that matter: Posthuman feminism and Naomi Alderman's the Power

The focus of this thesis is the examination of posthuman feminist elements in the novel The Power, written by Naomi Alderman as a speculative fiction. Published in 2017, this novel has received praise from other feminist speculative fiction writers such as Margaret Atwood. With her fiction, Alderman winks at the digital feminist movements and feminist solidarity attributed to the fourth wave of feminism, while questioning the gender roles constructed in the society living under the patriarchal hegemony and the narratives in which women are often obscured. Alderman depicts The Power as a "frame narrative" consisting of correspondence between a fictional historical novelist Neil Adam Armon (an anagram of "Naomi Alderman") and Alderman's own character, also fictionalized as a female writer. It is a thought-provoking speculative fiction that asks "what if?" question to imagine a society altered by the unexpected emergence of a unique power among women gained by the organ of electricity, named the skein. In Chapter One, the theoretical framework of this study is constructed. While outlining the definition of speculative fiction and its role in shaping narratives, this chapter examines how posthumanism deconstructs the figure known as 'Man' and, from that critique, how posthuman feminism emerges and is practiced within speculative fiction. Chapter Two is devoted to introducing Naomi Alderman as the author of The Power, exploring her experience as a woman writer through the novel's frame of correspondence between authors, and then analyzing the feminist narratives characteristic of speculative fiction within The Power as well as the text's multi-layered temporal structure. In Chapter Three, the feminist critique of "Anthropos," narrative agency, body politics, the symbolic function of the recurring hand motif, and forms of resistance are all analyzed with reference to contemporary examples. The purpose of this thesis is to examine Naomi Alderman's literary work titled The Power through the posthuman feminist perspective and investigate the impact of this perspective on the speculative fiction genre in this particular work. This study asserts that Alderman's The Power stands as a significant contribution to the intersection of speculative fiction and posthuman feminism in accordance with the current situation of feminism in the world.