The Power: Speculating on the female future of the past
Channel: Recording Archaeology
Date: 2019-03-25

Professor Naomi Alderman’s 2016 science fiction novel The Power details a ‘speculative dystopia’ in which women gain the power to electrocute at will, thus gaining physical dominance over men. The story itself is framed as a speculative account of that era written by a male researcher, including diagrams of both fictional and non-fictional archaeological artefacts. As archaeologists, we are worldbuilders. Using The Power as a primer, it will be argued that dismissing gender stereotypes and binary notions of gender identity allows for more nuanced and rigorous interpretations of the past. Furthermore, The Power invites us to speculate about the future of our own discipline which is becoming increasingly more dominated by women, and to interrogate the idea that such a future would inevitably be utopic or dystopic in nature. 

Florence Smith Nicholls