Description:

Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel turned Hulu serialized drama The Handmaid’s Tale (1985, 2017, respectively) arrived as a chilling forewarning during the early days of Donald Trump’s presidency. The series, and the thousands of memes, parodies, and street performances at protests emerged as an important popular culture and mediated symbol of the new Anti-Trump/Pence feminist resistance, as fans linked the series’ fictionalized dystopian society to the very real onslaught of women’s reproductive rights in policy making and other oppressive elements of the current US government. Both the novel and the serialized television drama engage the politics of gender, race and right-wing political regimes, and both can be considered examples of what I call “popular feminism.” In this talk, I contend with how, and in what ways, the rise of popular feminism in the twenty-first-century North American and European context has encouraged both a response and an intensification of popular misogyny. Here, using the frame of popular cultural iterations of The Handmaid’s Tale, I explore the ways a popular feminist text responds to an increasingly visible context of popular misogyny. I argue that we need to understand the relationship between popular feminism and popular misogyny in order to grasp the significance, and the endurance, of both. What does reading a novel or watching a series about the oppression of women involve, and what kinds of resistance or collective activism to the politics of contemporary moment might The Handmaid’s Tale engender?