Feminists,
please stop watching The Handmaid's Tale
The
Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood was published in an "unburnable"
edition by Penguin Random House in May of this year. Atwood was seen
celebrating by torching the copy, which later sold for $40,000 and the money
went to PEN America. The performance seemed fairly underwhelming. What was it
exactly that was not burning? The book itself, which is brilliantly dark and
politically dubious, or what it has come to represent? A TV show, a crimson
cape, and the feminist movement losing its sense of reality. Are those actually
terrifying to anyone?
The
outfits from Atwood's 1985 novel have become recognisable over the previous
five years. The handmaid's cape has become "one of the most potent current
emblems of feminist protest," according to the Guardian, as a result of
the election of Donald Trump and the subsequent release of the TV adaption.
Being
a feminist, I adore the book. But I'm tired of seeing the cape and, along with
it, the notion that Atwood's writing can be read as a commentary on
contemporary gender dynamics. It now serves as a means of misrepresenting them
both.
Offred
is the primary character of the narrative, and while dressing up as her is a
common trend worldwide, liberal feminists in the US have made it a special
emblem of their pro-choice movement. Vanity Fair speculated in 2018 that
"these dissenters in eerie cloaks and hats might not restore Roe v.
Wade," but they "do present a continual, scary reminder to
Washington, D.C. that women are watching."
Red-clad
protesters gathered outside Amy Coney Barrett's home in May of this year in
response to a leak that suggested Roe v. Wade would be overturned. It's
possible that "scary cloaks" don't have the same authority as the
supreme court. However, as one "handmaid" stated, "this is
performance art; we're not protesting."
A
movement is down, and I don't want to kick it. However, I wonder whether
existing strategies are assisting or impeding. This is feminism that is running
away from reality; it is not feminism that uses storytelling as a creative
outlet. It may not be the cause of the current crisis, but mainstream,
US-centric feminism's plunge into fantasy — and its shame of any woman who
keeps a toehold in material reality — is impeding the development of cohesion
in resistance.
One
advantage of the handmaid's attire, according to some, is that protesters don't
have to speak when wearing it. We are protected from words like woman, female,
biology, sex, and gender. We utilise symbols without realising that once you
become the symbol, it no longer serves any symbolic purpose. The red cape has
completely replaced the role of a critique rather than serving as a shorthand
for it.
The
growth of Handmaid's Tale feminism has coincided with an unparalleled
curtailment of reproductive rights in America, which organisations like Planned
Parenthood and NARAL have vehemently (and correctly) resisted. However, these
organisations have also worked to limit the terminology that women can use to
describe their situation, with NARAL telling us that "not just women"
require abortions.
It's
trans males, AFAB non-binary persons, cis women, and other uterus owners,
therefore of course it's not. Plus, the adult human ladies from Atwood's
Gilead, it is all of them. For whatever reason, "handmaid" is a more
appropriate pronoun for the person who requires an abortion than
"woman." You might find it simpler to defend fictional characters
than actual people when you can't even say who conceives.
This
has nothing to do with the content of the book itself or Atwood's own views on
the current gender conversation (she recently "taught" us about the
"flowing bell curve" of gender using transsexual fish, gay penguins,
and slug sex, according to Pink News). Good literature thrives outside of the
author's precepts; it can and often does challenge established hierarchies, but
it does not dictate.
Feminist
analysis has been strengthened by literary scholarship, and feminist analysis
has played a significant role in literary scholarship. The Handmaid's Tale is a
work worth reading because it raises more questions than it provides solutions
in addition to its rigorous examination of difficult subjects like complicity
vs force, the allure of adaptability, the boundaries of sisterhood, and
feminism itself.
Offred
is the main character in the story, but there are other women in it as well,
including other handmaidens, Marthas, aunts, wives, econowives, unwomen, and
Jezebel's employees. These women are all negotiating a new normal on their own
terms. It is still unclear whether episodic assault, as opposed to organised,
systematic abuse, is the most that women may expect.
Better
never equals better for everyone, to quote the Commander. For some, it always
means worse. This can be interpreted as the patriarch offering his typical
justifications or as one of the major challenges to attaining an intersectional
feminism. The book's greatest merits lie in this simultaneous occurrence of
unrelenting horror and ambiguous ideologies, as well as the brutal truths that
even the worst characters speak.
The
draining away of this nuance is what has happened to The Handmaid's Tale as a
current cultural phenomenon. According to the protests, you would have assumed
that the novel was only about Christian rights and abortion. However,
Handmaid's Tale feminism claims that the antagonists of the story neatly
correspond to "our" antagonists, and vice versa. It spares us all the
trouble of having to think, let alone the danger of having to empathise with
the other.
The
worst aspect of the attack on Roe v. Wade, in the eyes of an elite element of
the Left, is that it makes the sex-based oppression of women so obviously
visible. This simplification and distortion fill that need. If you subscribe to
the notion that admitting the existence of biologically feminine persons
identifies you as a fascist, this is politically embarrassing.
With
Handmaid's Tale feminism, every feminist analysis that considers sex difference
is called into question by the uniqueness of a made-up scenario. By insisting
that the Republic of Gilead's views on women are an exact replica of those of
the modern US right, the current abortion crisis is turned into a debate about
economic concerns, religious fundamentalism, and other topics unrelated to the
nature of female bodies and how they differ from those of men.
Women,
however, "are not an afterthought of nature, they are not subsidiary
participants in human destiny, and every culture has always realised
that," Atwood said in a recent forward to the book. Human populations will
eventually become extinct without reproductively capable women. Left and right
may dispute about the best ways to carry out this exploitation of female bodies
as a resource, but all sides contribute.
Any
discussion of the rise of commercial surrogacy is the Handmaid's Tale
feminism's most obvious omission. The non-believing, pro-surrogacy Left is
undoubtedly doing the most to legitimise women's status as "two-legged
wombs" if we are to draw parallels between the specific ways in which
handmaids are exploited and modern reproductive injustice.
The
left's pick-and-mix reconstruction of patriarchy, in which female bodies may be
rented out piecemeal in the name of choice, mirrors Gilead's separation between
econowives who are "not separated into functions" and the more
complex hierarchy of wives, handmaids, and underground sex workers. If you
treat a person as an "ambulatory vessel" in the name of upending or
reinstating the conventional family, or whether you force her to wear red, it
doesn't really matter to the vessel herself.
Handmaid's
Tale feminism is currently devouring itself, as is the way with a feminism that
is no longer about or for women. According to the Washington DC Women's March
in 2021, handmaid outfits promote "greater fragmentation, frequently
around race and class." The red cape has also been criticised for being
overly protective.
While
"Black Lives Matter T-shirts advocate an America that cherishes black
lives in a way it never has before," according to arts journalist Alina
Cohen, the women's movement is currently challenged to come up with an equally
pithy, visually arresting symbology for the society we do want. The issue is
that without a positive definition of women as a foundation, it is impossible
to advocate for women. Women may only ever be shown as perpetually on the
defensive handmaidens.
Even
while I dislike its imperialist tendencies, I don't want to be too critical of
the feminism that is primarily North American in origin. This may seem overly
harsh coming from a nation like TERF island, where surrogate moms still have rights
and may access free abortion and paid maternity leave. The fictional
"Historical Notes" that follow Offred's story do, however, include a
reference to "the different Save the Women groups, of which there were
several in the British Isles at that time." (I bet Mumsnet is where they
got started.) That is one detail I can support if reality is forced into
fiction.
Atwood,
brandishing a blowtorch, has happily supported the devaluation of her own work.
Regardless of her aspirations for promotion, I don't think it really matters
because she cannot erase her own genius. My concern is not with her book, but
with the sloganeering that has been associated with it. Feminism as shown in
The Handmaid's Tale may not burn to death, but that's only because it never
existed in the first place.