In her debut novel Autokrator (Cormorant Books, 2024), award-winning multidisciplinary artist, producer and writer Emily A. Weedon has created a chilling dystopian world that relegates women to the fringes. Both a thought experiment and a reflection of her personal experience as a woman and mother, the novel explores – and maybe even explodes – themes of gender, power, and identity.
Weedon weaves a speculative world where women called ‘Unmales’ are stripped of their rights and forced to serve men from the shadows. The story is told from the dual perspective of its central characters. The first is Tiresius, an Unmale who has disguised herself as a male for years, and has risen to the position of Imperial Treasurer—a deception that is a severe “gender crime” punishable by death. The second is Cera, a Domestic whose son, taken from her at birth, is the successor to the Autokracy – a fact which leads her to take dangerous steps in order to be part of his life. As the two characters’ fates intertwine, the story examines rebellion, power, and gender within this brutal patriarchal regime, loosely based on ancient Greece.
Reflecting current global concerns like the rise of autocracy and the erosion of women’s rights, Autokrator serves as both a cautionary tale and a thought-provoking treatise about the insidious and longstanding repercussions of established societal structures.
The Birth of Autokrator: Loneliness and Invisibility
The seed that would grow inot Autokrator was planted during a period of upheaval in Weedon’s life. “At the time I had the idea for Autokrator, I was at the tail end of a relationship, and very alone. I was also a new mother, and my relationship with my own mother had always been difficult.” For this self-described “social creature and . . . person who seeks connection and expression,” the sense of isolation—within her personal relationships and the challenge of new motherhood—became the foundation of a desire to “think big thoughts” and explore ideas of an “oppressive world where women are flattened by domestic work”.
A visit to Schönbrunn Palace in Vienna further cemented the idea of women’s invisibility. Walking through it, she was struck by the secret passageways that were used by servants to remain hidden. “What a fantastic metaphor for the invisible work of women,” she recounts. While she was “moved by the grandeur of the place and the sense of power, during that tour, my ex was hammering me with criticism and unkindness, and my toddler was freaking out”. As a result, “I was denied the art the same way a single man would not have been,” she says. The experience stuck with her. It rankled, and ultimately helped to shape the novel’s depiction of women’s roles in society.
The Power of Words: A Cry Against Oppression
Central to the themes of isolation and invisibility is Weedon’s powerful use of language as a tool for resistance. This is encapsulated perfectly by the novel’s provocative opening line: “I am a gender criminal. I am Unmale, yet I write as though I am a person.” Weedon explains that this line was inspired by Tiresius, a mythological figure who lived as both a man and a woman. “How I adore Tiresius and her wrath at the world for mistreating her based on her gender! This was an early inspiration – a woman about to die, yet full of ire and spite, and self-possessed enough to sneer at her oppressors.”
Tiresius, Weedon explains, “lives in a world that forces her into Maleness in order to live. It is a world where only men count – as thinkers, as persons. They are so anti-woman that they erase even the word ‘woman’. And the idea that a woman might think or write is heretical.” This may sound extreme, but Weedon draws direct parallels between this fictional world and current headlines, noting that this “is a world that looks a lot like what is emerging in Afghanistan, where even women’s voices in public have been outlawed.” The opening line thus becomes a “cri de coeur for all women who are silenced”– an expression of defiance against a system that seeks to erase female identity.
Gender and the Rigid System of Autokrator
Despite the novel’s focus on gender politics, Weedon did not initially set out to write a story about such themes. Instead, her intention was to explore the speculative question, “Could things for women be even worse?” Thus, she prefers that readers view the narrative as a “what if” and a thought experiment. As the novel developed, her central question led to the creation of this society where only men are seen as valuable, and where the males see females as bad, and create the term “Unmale”.
Weedon notes how language plays a key role in enforcing oppressive norms, as in George Orwell’s 1984, with its manipulation of words to obscure truth. “We are good at creating words for things we don’t like – renaming” them, she contends. “In the same way Orwell created ‘The Ministry of Peace’ to mean the ‘War Bureau’. Or in the way we call a toilet a ‘powder room”. We avoid unpleasantness and kid ourselves about the true nature of things.”
Her thought experiment soon led her to wonder about “how a smart, resourceful woman might try to game the system” which is so stacked against her. Weedon was inspired by Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, particularly the motif of women dressing as men to “to get things done in a man’s world. I was working with the idea of disguising gender as a story point, first and foremost,” she explains.
The Influence of Motherhood
At the same time, Weedon’s own experience as a single mother profoundly shaped the character of Cera in Autokrator. “I had a very difficult pregnancy, birth, and early motherhood,” she explains, describing how her partner distanced himself during this vulnerable time: never laying his hand on her pregnant belly, and rarely touching after she became pregnant. During labour, he criticized her for not doing “a good job” because she was offered morphine. And he later told her that things like brushing hair and changing diapers were “woman’s work”. “It was intense,” she recalls, with clear understatement.
These emotional and physical challenges influenced the body horror elements of the novel, which highlight broader societal mistreatment of women’s bodies – and how they are commodified in everyday life, often in ways that go unnoticed. In real life, Weedon had been striving for natural childbirth, but had“a nurse hovering over her in the dark, “whispering evil things about babies strangling on umbilical cords”. After a three-day labour that culminated in what Weedon believes was an unnecessary C-section, she was left with physical dysfunction which still affects her back and hips. “You are so vulnerable as a pregnant person and as a mother,” she remarks. Cera and her travails were partly borne out of these horrors Weedon had experienced.
Power and Resistance in a Dystopian World
At the core of Autokrator is a meditation on power and resistance – though Weedon is quick to point out that Tiresius is not driven by a desire to overthrow the system. Instead, she seeks to claim power within it, even developing a kind of contempt for other women who do not seek the same. As Tiresius grapples with the complexities of power, identity, and survival, “this is a kind of self-hatred,” explains Weedon.
And her exploration of power extends beyond Tiresius’s fight against the system into the complex relationships among women in the novel – particularly when societal expectations come into play. She notes the harsh divide between stay-at-home mothers and working mothers in online forums. “Can’t we support one another’s choices and not judge? Aren’t we echoing the judgment of a male-skewed society when we do that?” she wonders. “It’s a thorny issue – and the party line sometimes seems to be, just say that all women support all women, and don’t hint that it might be otherwise. Well, it is otherwise. Women are as multifaceted and multidimensional as men – with good and bad, selfishness and selflessness and everything under the sun within them – even though we are expected to be nice, smile, and be kind.”
Through Tiresius, Weedon deliberately breaks the mold of what is expected of women, presenting a character who is “deeply flawed, multifaceted, and larger than life”.
The Future of Gender, Reproduction, and Technology
Beyond gender and power, Autokrator also tackles reproductive control and rapid technological advances. Weedon highlights three key themes that she believes will shape the future: 1) the loss of women’s rights; 2) the rise of autocracy worldwide, and 3) the ability to create human life externally from the human womb.
“This issue is bigger than I think we fully comprehend,” she warns. In a world where someone chooses who lives, “what becomes of those humans born mechanically, especially if they are further genetically tinkered with? And what if AI somehow becomes in charge of external wombs? I do not think humans are emotionally evolved enough to handle what they have wrought with technology.”
In the end, while Autokrator explores pressing social issues in vivid and often disturbing detail, Weedon’s primary goal remains to tell an epic and compelling story—one that resonates with readers on both a personal and societal level. “At the end of the day, I wrote for readers, knowing it is my job to earn and keep their attention on the story,” she says. Her bottom line? “I strove to create catharsis.” In all of her aims, she has succeeded ably, leaving readers to await her next novel HEMO Sapiens, coming in fall 2025, published by Dundurn Press.
© Arpita Ghosal, SesayArts Magazine, 2024
