Finding Your Role in a Feminist Dystopia: The Current
What if five women holding hands could stop a rapist?
It's 2029.
Something happens that nobody can explain. When women hold hands, a current runs between them. It only works in numbers. Five women together can put a grown man on the ground.
Within weeks, the videos start. A man flat on the pavement outside a bar. Five women standing over him, still holding on Assaults start to fall. Then the men start fighting back.
This episode is inspired by Naomi Alderman's novel The Power.
Right now we are collectively asking, AGAIN, for the ELEVENTY-MILLIONTH time, how to hold rapists accountable. Courts keep failing women, and so do the institutions that promise to protect them. This is the place to ask the harder version of that question: What would it actually take to stop them, and would you be willing to do it?
In this alternate reality, the power to stop them is in your hands. Literally. Would you use it? Would you use it for all of us?
We'll go deep, and it will get real, really quick.
How It Works
Each episode of Finding Your Role in a Feminist Dystopia drops you into a different near-future world, built from feminist speculative fiction and signals already visible in the present. The story unfolds in four acts over two hours. You'll make choices as the world changes, write privately between acts, and talk through what you notice with the same small circle of women throughout.
You'll leave with:
A read on your own instincts under pressure.
A clearer sense of why this story feels so close to the present.
Your role, and one concrete thing you can do with it.
The experience of facing something hard alongside other women.
Each episode stands on its own. Come to one or come to all of them. No writing experience or familiarity with science fiction required.
This workshop is for women and femme-identified people.
Content note: This experience explores sexual violence, abuse, and women physically confronting men. There will be no graphic depictions of sexual violence, and no participant will ever be asked to share personal experiences.
About the facilitator:
Tracee Worley is the founder of Radical Futures, a speculative design studio working at the intersection of collapse and imagination. Her work helps individuals and organizations sense into what this moment is asking of us. She believes women's leadership is how we meet volatile times, by grounding ourselves in care, relationship, and collective power.
Image source: Martha Rich for The New York Times