ABSTRACT
George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) shows the dangers of totalitarianism. This danger is echoed in Pinter’s Party Time (1991). Antonio Gramsci (1992) described totalitarianism as the ability of the dominant class to project its own way of seeing the world onto those who are subordinated and have it accepted by them as ‘common sense’ and ‘natural’ (Alvardo and Boyd-Barret, 1992). To unpack the implications of Gramsci’s words, I deploy his political theories together with Michel Foucault’s to investigate the power of the political system in relation to individual freedom and identity. I conclude by examining the gendered nature of power using feminist theories.
