Towards Non-binary Science Fiction: Naomi Alderman’s The Power athwart Difference Feminism

In her science fiction novel The Power, Naomi Alderman unsettles the coordinates of Western biopower by imagining a matriarchal regime responsible for the direct reversal of essentialist categories to the detriment of the male population. Traversing the nature/culture divide and addressing recent debates around gender politics, in this article, Alderman’s work will be framed within the domain of queer speculative fiction with the aim to show how her novel counterintuitively configures as a non-binary narrative where the spectrum of gender identity is not reduced to male-female distinctions. By addressing the essentialist drift of some differentialist and separatist stances in feminism, which perceive the erasure of sexual boundaries as a threat to the essence of what it means to be “woman,”the nuanced queering drive of Alderman’s poetics will be presented as the evidence that it is only by scattering dualistic notions rooted in biology and ultimately rearranging both the social and symbolic order that the existing patriarchal system can be overturned.