Gender, Bodies, and American Christian Nationalism in Naomi Alderman's /The Power/

Abstract

Naomi Alderman's The Power (2016) imagines a world in which women develop the ability to deliver powerful electric shocks, reversing gender relations and leading to the establishment of global matriarchy enforced by violence. While the existing scholarship by José M. Yebra and Alyson Miller focuses on the figure of Mother Eve as a critique of global patriarchal religion as well as the relationship between religious and state power in Bessapara, I attend to the often-neglected figure of Margot, a rising American politician. In this paper, I examine the rhetoric surrounding Margot, arguing that Alderman uses Margot to satirize contemporary white evangelical Christianity and its accompanying right-wing political agendas. I explore the historic connections between abstinence-only sex education, patriarchy, and nationalism, analyze the novel's parody of American political rhetoric, compare the depiction of Margot's queer-coded daughter Jocelyn to gay conversion therapy, and examine the novel's depiction of both sexual and military violence. Ultimately, I argue that The Power's depiction of a sexually violent, nationalistic, and ultimately apocalyptic American matriarchy is in fact a representation of American evangelicalism that has "changed Her garment merely" (127).