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Dear Reader,

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How can we eliminate the corrosive effect of power itself? That is the question I intended to answer in this book. The conclusions I reached were nothing like what I expected. More importantly, they were nothing like what I wanted.

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Power has always been the target of my personal and professional struggles. Since I can remember feeling, I have felt intensely the injustice of powerlessness—the pain caused by societal validation of oppressive power distributions.  I have felt this as deeply as I have felt anything. That fundamental caring has formed my political and personal self and my principles of solidarity.  From what are we seeking liberation if not the unjust exercise of power, the myriad threads in the cloth that is woven throughout our lives and manifests in unique patterns depending on our identities both true and assigned? I have worked to understand and to dismantle power and dominion in all its interwoven and overlapping manifestations. I believe in the primacy of power dynamics in both our interpersonal interactions and our societal structures and codes. This is how I have known and processed our world and my own experiences of power and powerlessness.

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Nothing could have prepared me for what I ended up producing with this book. My own ideas hurt and upset me—they made me angry. Not only did I, who have always detested philosophy, written a work that could fairly be classed as philosophical, but a thousand times more importantly, I was birthing a book that writes power out of existence.

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No matter my resistance, there was simply no denying my ultimate thesis: Power does not exist.

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This hurt me. It left me raw and angry and in denial. I felt betrayed by my own mind. I know power is real--it has shaped and affected my whole life. I have spent that life exploring how you can explain, cajole, convince, manipulate and force power to acknowledge oppression and harm. So that the systems of oppressive power can be named and dismantled. So that the harm done to people by those systems is recognized by society. How could my own book ask me to let that go?  

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Indeed, the letting go has been unbearable. It has reduced me to anguish, to hard-wrung tears. My own liberation, my purpose and healing as a survivor of a spectrum of harm, has been my work to undo power structures that cultivate and generate such violence At the most personal level, I have needed to make that harm known and recognized in communities and society. My survival and healing have been bound up in my broader commitment to struggles against the many power structures that harm and oppress people.  We have been working together to dismantle power, and that collective struggle has been my purpose and my hope.

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After I processed the personal grief of letting go, my writing still felt like a betrayal of this collective justice work. Intellectually, I am comfortable with the dialectic. Yes, I am disputing the existence of power, but the study of the concept itself remains crucial to any analysis of how we organize ourselves and our society. This book sprang from the recognition of power as the structural foundation of oppression manifested in interpersonal and group interactions. The concept is baked into our societal schematics. Indeed, every theory I present in this book owes its construction to the brilliance and bravery of those who have worked for liberation and to dismantle power as we have conceived it.  And I know the path forward still lies in that work.

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Overall, I am still not comfortable. I am not in love with my own ideas. They do not resonate in my body the way an exquisite articulation of personal experience should. Instead, this book was a physical struggle. A very long walk that I needed but did not want. I have walked back and forth to find a truth I can live with, and it is reflected in the structure of the book. I move forward towards justice and liberation. I attempt to work my way backward from theory and utopia, hoping to draw a more complete map. 

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Somewhere the paths must meet in transformational shift, a bridge between what is and could be. I hope that understanding “power” as an absence, an ephemera, a god we have created to explain the effect of certain societal manifestations, helps illuminate the spaces in which people are seeking to build that bridge for ourselves, our communities, and our world.

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Yours in solidarity across the shared and the unknowable alike,

Emily Turner.