Such mechanistic conceptions of power and empowerment are, I believe, ultimately incompatible with a mature, theoretically sophisticated feminism. It is true that power is a necessary element of any school of feminism, primarily because feminism is inherently critical and political; feminist practices are designed to intervene in history, to change the world, not just to analyze reality from a safe, objective distance. I maintain, though, that the most genuinely feminist expression of power is power-with. More specifically, as feminists strive to destabilize oppressive hierarchies and cultural hegemonies, power-with is the most effective kind of power. Gore offers a vision of feminist empowerment “as the exercise of power in the attempt to help others to exercise power (rather than as the giving of power)” (62). Power, in a postmodern feminist sense, is something that comes into being between people--and perhaps between people and technologies as well; it is relational. Power cannot be possessed by anyone; it is not something that exists inside a person; it exists only between people or other entities.