“Gender is a shell game”. Political imagination on feminist dystopias
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.60923/issn.2421-454X/22888Keywords:
Television series, politics, cultural studies, textual analysis, DystopiaAbstract
The dystopian genre is defined as narratives that portray societies in which a substantial majority of humanity suffers slavery and/or oppression as a result of human action (Claeys, 2017). This work draws on academic studies of dystopian fiction and analyzes, in particular, a fictional series based on Noemi Alderman's novel, The Power. Sharing the same name as the novel, the series produced by Amazon Prime imagines a scenario in which women acquire a power that gives them the ability to generate electricity. In light of this, the present study offers a thematic analysis that identifies the dystopian tradition in which the fiction under study is framed. To this end, a theoretical framework has been developed that contextualizes the different dystopian typologies; these themes have subsequently been used for analysis by means of a qualitative narrative textual template. The results indicate differences from the original novel, given that the fiction analyzed falls within the category of feminist critical dystopias.
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