Abstract
This article investigates the critical potential of a contemporary dystopia, The Handmaid’s Tale (Miller 2017-), a U.S. television series adapted from a popular novel by Canadian author Margaret Atwood (1985). The text is widely understood as a feminist intervention that speaks to ongoing struggles against gender oppression, but in this article I consider the invitations that the show offers its viewers in treating race the way that it does, and consider what it means to refuse these invitations in pursuit of a critical feminist understanding of authority, legal subjectivity, and violence. Drawing on the recent turn to genre, my reading focuses on how whiteness is reproduced through this cinematic text and its inculcation of particular ways of seeing, modes of identification and attachment. The Handmaid’s Tale’s post-racial aesthetic means that its thematic engagement with gender, sexuality and resistance actively disavows national and international histories of racist state violence and white supremacy. Its problematic feminism is thus uniquely instructive for understanding how whiteness is reproduced in contemporary (neo)liberal configurations of legal subjectivity and state authority.
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Notes
In the United States it has been taken up by Planned Parenthood in several states; in Ireland it appeared as part of the successful campaign to repeal the 8th Amendment prohibiting abortion; in Queensland, Australia, as part of a move to decriminalise abortion; and in Poland to greet a visiting Donald Trump (see further Hauser 2017). The visual iconography did not emerge from the show alone. The first protest to use the costume was actually in 2012, prior to the show, but these increased rapidly in 2017, beginning a few months before the show premiered, coinciding with the marketing campaign that preceded the release.
The book’s passing reference to Gilead’s racism is powerfully rendered in the earlier film version of The Handmaid’s Tale (Schlöndorff 1990), in a scene showing the deportation of visible minorities.
The critique first emerged on online media outlets devoted largely to analysing popular culture (Nair 2017; McDonald 2017; Gibney and Askeland 2017) before being picked up by more mainstream publications like Canadian’s MacLeans (Williams 2017) and more generalised women’s interest magazines like Nylon, Glamour and Cosmopolitan (Iversen 2017; Holloway 2017; Young 2017). Eventually it was picked up by Vulture and The New York Times (Bastién 2017c). A couple of months into its run and The Handmaid’s Tale was being called by a male, writing in Medium, ‘White Feminism as a Show’ (Daniel 2017).
As Barbara Ehrenreich remarked about the book, ‘Offred cries a lot and lives in fear of finding her erstwhile husband hanging from a hook on the wall, but when she is finally contacted by the resistance, she is curiously uninterested. She has sunk too far into the incestuous little household she serves—just as the reader, not without intermittent spasms of resistance, sinks into the deepening masochism of her tale’ (Ehrenreich 1986, p. 34).
My thanks to Mairead Enright for pointing this out.
Phyllis Schlafly was an American constitutional lawyer and conservative political activist. Ann Coulter is an American conservative social and political commentator, writer, columnist, and lawyer who frequently appears on television, radio, and as a speaker at public and private events.
Compare with the book where the narrator reflects on Serena Joy: ‘She doesn't make speeches anymore. She has become speechless… How furious she must be, now that she’s been taken at her word’ (Atwood 1985, p. 61).
Many call for more attention to be paid to the black science-fiction canon of women writers, including authors such as Octavia Butler, Jewell Gomez and Nalo Hopkinson. Octavia Butler's Parable series imagines a racist theocracy much like Gilead. But rather than focusing on white people, it tells the story of the black and interracial communities targeted for death and exploitation by the regime. Published in 1993, Parable of the Sower features a dictator whose slogan is ‘Make America Great Again.’
The concluding ‘historical notes’ at the end of the book are set at the 12th symposium on Gileadian Studies in 2195 and feature a keynote speech by the Professor who discovered and transcribed Offred’s account after her apparent escape from Gilead, who explains Gilead’s reproductive caste structure as follows: ‘Men highly placed in this regime (of Gilead) were able to pick and choose among women who had demonstrated their reproductive fitness by having produced one or more healthy children, a desirable characteristic in an age of plummeting Caucasian birth rates, a phenomenon observable not only in Gilead but in most northern Caucasian societies of the time’ (Atwood 1985, p. 317).
My thanks to Desmond Manderson for suggesting this phrase.
My thanks to Tanya Serisier for making me thinking more about this point.
Terms used in Gilead to describe infants that are suffering from birth defects or physical deformations.
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Tom Andrews, Mark Antaki, Chris Butler, Luis Eslava, Ann Genovese, Laura Griffin, Adil Hasan Khan, Coel Kirkby, Desmond Manderson, William MacNeil, Shaun McVeigh, Ed Mussawir, Rose Parfitt, James Parker, Connal Parsley, Tim Peters, Honni van Rijswijk, Tanya Serisier, Nan Seuffert and Raoul Wieland for helpful conversations about this paper, and the participants at the 2017 Conference of the Law, Literature and Humanities Association of Australasia on ‘Dissents and Dispositions’ for their generous engagement and feedback. All errors remain my own.
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Crawley, K. Reproducing Whiteness: Feminist Genres, Legal Subjectivity and the Post-racial Dystopia of The Handmaid’s Tale (2017-). Law Critique 29, 333–358 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10978-018-9229-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10978-018-9229-8