Finding Your Role in a Feminist Dystopia
Many women feel it. Something has shifted, and the ground that seemed settled no longer is.
Rights that felt permanent are being rolled back. Pregnancy is being prosecuted as a crime. No-fault divorce is on the chopping block in statehouses. There are calls, out loud now, to repeal the 19th Amendment. The headlines read like pages from a Margaret Atwood novel and that resemblance is not a coincidence.
Recognizing the pattern is the easy part. The harder question is the one this workshop is built around. Who do you become when the future you feared starts to arrive?
In this two-hour interactive experience, you'll step into a carefully constructed near-future scenario, built from feminist speculative fiction and the signals already visible in the present. As the story unfolds, you'll make choices, journal, and talk through what you notice about your own instincts, assumptions, and responses.
Every feminist dystopia runs on where ordinary people stand. The true believer who builds it. The one who benefits and looks away. The bystander who keeps their head down. The quiet refuser. The defector who works against it, out loud or in secret. Most of us have been several of these, in different rooms, on different days. Together we'll find where you tend to stand, and the direction this moment is asking you to move.
You'll leave with:
A clearer sense of the patterns underneath feminist dystopian fiction, and why they feel so familiar right now.
A read on your own instincts under pressure.
A concrete sense of your role, and one thing you can do with it.
This workshop is for women and femme-identified people. No writing experience or familiarity with science fiction required.
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