• About Us
    • About the platform
    • Editorial Collective
  • Essays
    • Short Essays
    • Longer Reads
    • Reviews
    • Interviews
  • Series
    • Reimagining, remembering and reclaiming water
    • Political Ecologies of the Far Right
    • Green inequalities in the city
    • Authoritarianism, populism and political ecology
    • Ecology after Capitalism
    • Ecomodernist socialism and comunist futurism
    • Political Ecology for Civil Society
    • World Press Photography Awards
  • Resources
  • Events and Calls
  • Art & multimedia
  • Contribute
  • About Us
    • About the platform
    • Editorial Collective
  • Essays
    • Short Essays
    • Longer Reads
    • Reviews
    • Interviews
  • Series
    • Reimagining, remembering and reclaiming water
    • Political Ecologies of the Far Right
    • Green inequalities in the city
    • Authoritarianism, populism and political ecology
    • Ecology after Capitalism
    • Ecomodernist socialism and comunist futurism
    • Political Ecology for Civil Society
    • World Press Photography Awards
  • Resources
  • Events and Calls
  • Art & multimedia
  • Contribute
  • About Us
    • About the platform
    • Editorial Collective
  • Essays
    • Short Essays
    • Longer Reads
    • Reviews
    • Interviews
  • Series
    • Reimagining, remembering and reclaiming water
    • Political Ecologies of the Far Right
    • Green inequalities in the city
    • Authoritarianism, populism and political ecology
    • Ecology after Capitalism
    • Ecomodernist socialism and comunist futurism
    • Political Ecology for Civil Society
    • World Press Photography Awards
  • Resources
  • Events and Calls
  • Art & multimedia
  • Contribute
Utopias against modernity: Huxley, Serreau and the making of non-capitalist ecologies
April 25, 2018
The dystopian world of the Handmaid’s tale 2/2
May 9, 2018

The dystopian world of the Handmaid’s tale 1/2

Published by Undisciplined Environments on May 3, 2018

ENTITLE Blog presents two reflections on the dystopian world of the Handmaid’s tale. In the first, Júlia Hosta Cuy argues that the bleak future depicted in the series and the book should not make us complacent about the current position of women: liberalism is not the alternative to theocracy.

The huge success of Hulu’s 2017 web television series, the ‘Handmaid’s tale’ (receiving widespread critical acclaim and eight Primetime Emmy Awards including Outstanding Drama Series) brought back to attention Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel of the same name. The book and the series are situated in a not so far future, where the theocracy of Gilead has established itself in parts of Eastern USA after a Second American Civil War. A group of fertile women in Gilead, called “Handmaids”, is forced into sexual and childbearing servitude. The chilling parallels with USA in the Trump era did not escape viewers or critics, pronounced in the TV series with a visual aesthetic that made the dystopia eerily contemporary.

Present dystopias

by Júlia Hosta Cuy

It is an environmental disaster, and the dramatic decrease in fertility that ensues, which serves as the excuse to establish the religious authoritarian regime of the Republic of Gilead. Named after a biblical region, Gilead is a hierarchical society where women have no real power, no autonomy, no place in political decisions or intellectual life. Even the women from the upper classes are reduced to just wives.

The authorities control and own the body of the few remaining fertile women with just one purpose: procreation for the nation and its upper class. Like June, the protagonist, the red-dressed handmaids are raped in their fertile day of the month by the ‘Commander’ (Fred, hence June’s Gilead name ‘Offred’), in a religious ceremony.

The whole Gilead is in a social and ecological crisis: the population is declining without regeneration. When a Mexican ambassador visits Gilead, we learn that the crisis is not confined to Gilead only – the Mexicans also want handmaids to move their own economy and they are willing to trade them with oranges.

In Gilead, the body of the handmaids is transformed into a baby-making machine, a uterus with legs as Moira – June’s friend – points out. Handmaids are subjugated to the reproduction of the ruling class. This process of commodification of womens’ bodies is not a new story. As Silvia Federici and Nancy Fraser, among others, have pointed out, the exploitation of women’s bodies, through reproductive work and the production of new workers, is a key mechanism, along with nature and colonial exploitation, of capitalist accumulation – primitive and continuous. In Gilead, the exploitation of the women’s bodies is justified, as so often has been the case in history, in the name of the Nation and its stability. Like the 16th century witches, who were deprived of their traditional means and knowledge of contraception and abortion, the handmaids can no longer be sovereigns of their physical bodies. This body-dispossession or body-alienation is, similarly to what happened in the beginning of capitalism, accompanied with the loss of their role as workers or their intellectual active life.

handmaids

Source: Business Insider


 

The most moving scene in the book (and the series), according to me, is when Commander Fred, in his personal meetings with June, gives her a women’s magazine he has kept in secret from the period before the theocracy. The commander asks June: “Do you miss this? A list of made up problems. No woman was ever rich enough, young enough, pretty enough, good enough”. To which June responds, “We had our choices then”.

It is this juxtaposition of present day liberalism as the better alternative to a dystopian future that I found most disturbing. The Commander is obviously wrong. But what is real in the freedom women have in our time, so nostalgically cherished by June? Her choice of freedom before Gilead was shaped by the capitalist and patriarchal system in which she lived. In Freire’s words, in Gilead is easier to differentiate between oppressed and oppressors. This separation may be diluted in our days, nevertheless, that does not make it less real.

Consider the aesthetic pressure that we face daily as women: about our lifestyles, relations and health. Publicity, marketing or songs are just another type of gender violence: they present an ideal of beauty and behavior that influence the way we live, even causing severe health problems as anorexia or bulimia (for example, 26.000 Catalan teenager girls suffered from anorexia or bulimia just in 2013).

Consider also the role of sex and the use of a woman’s body. In Gilead, sexuality is hidden in the name of immorality. But we live in the other extreme: the abuse of women’s sexuality and the idea that part of the reproductive labour of women is to gratify the sexual desires of man, do not just happen in spaces as Jezabel’s, the prostitution night club of Gilead, but in all life’s spheres. A woman who was a prostitute before Gilead and now is a handmaid, feels better in Gilead. She is safe; she does not need to sell her body to survive. Patriarchy has pornographized women sexuality. Almost every kind of sexual expression or sexual representation is modeled on it. Indeed, the voice of pornography – sexually explicit material with the primary purpose of arousal – is the voice of the ruling power: women are sexualized, subordinated, objectified and degraded as a consequence of man’s ideas of sex rights and our sexuality is celebrated just as a mechanism of control.

In Gilead, women and especially the handmaids are expropriated of their reproductive rights. But let us not be so proud of our record. Just 56 countries today – representing 39% of world’s population – contemplate the right to abortion without restrictions. 26% of all people in this planet reside in countries where abortion is prohibited under all circumstances.

The danger of picturing a dark future, following some sort of cataclysmic event, can make us complacent to think that we are fine now. The last thing we need now, as women’s rights are attacked on all fronts, is to perpetuate a state of meekness by not challenging the present. Reactionary positions are more and more common, but only if we do not confront the current situation, it is not unlikely that Gilead becomes a reality.

Júlia Hosta Cuy is a Master’s student of Ecological Economics at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona

 

Share
Undisciplined Environments
Undisciplined Environments

Related posts

June 28, 2022

Food saving: too good not to commodify


Read more
June 7, 2022

Public Water Services in times of emergency: the case of the Covid19 outbreak


Read more
May 24, 2022

Conflicts over the memorialization of water in Barcelona: A temporal turn in political ecology


Read more

0 Comments

  1. katharinehowell says:
    May 3, 2018 at 2:52 pm

    Reblogged this on Political Ecology Network.

    Reply
  2. May Monthly Newsletter | Political Ecology Network says:
    May 8, 2018 at 11:51 am

    […] The dystopian world of The Handmaid’s Tale by Júlia Hosta Cuy […]

    Reply
  3. The dystopian world of the Handmaid’s tale 2/2 – ENTITLE blog – a collaborative writing project on Political Ecology says:
    May 10, 2018 at 1:44 pm

    […] ways that gender, exploitation and nature play out in the politics of the Handmaid’s tale. Here the first contribution by Júlia Hosta […]

    Reply

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Search this site

✕

Subscribe to our Newsfeed

We keep your data private and share your data only with third parties that make this service possible. See our Privacy Policy for more information.

Check your inbox or spam folder to confirm your subscription.

Tags

Agriculture Alternatives Anthropocene Art Brazil Capitalism Cities Climate change Climate crisis Climate justice Colonialism, Post-colonialism & Decolonization Commoning Commons Conflicts Conservation & Biodiversity COVID-19 Culture Decolonial Political Ecologies Degrowth Democracy Development Disaster Energy Environmental Change Environmental History Environmental Justice Environmental movements Extractivism Food Forests Green inequalities Indigenous Peoples Land Methodologies Mining & Extractivism Movements & Resistance Neoliberalism Post-colonialism Post-colonialism & Decolonization Social Movements & Resistance Urban Violence Waste Water water governance

Visit WEGO

wegoint.org
This website is co-funded by WEGO

Popular Posts

  • Far Right Ecologism and the Conceptual Deficiencies of Ecofascism 894 views
  • Women Vs. Mining: A Video Project 254 views
  • The dystopian world of the Handmaid’s tale 2/2 243 views
  • Indigenous Science 207 views
  • Seminar: “Energy Transitions from Below: From Climate Colonialism to Energy Sovereignty”, 15 June 203 views
  • A comprehensive political ecology reading list 179 views

Recent Comments

  • April 22, 2022

    Europe: Our Wounds Are Bridges – Global Dialogue for Systemic Change commented on Post-Extractive Futures (Workshop-Conversation-Festival)

  • April 21, 2022

    Podcast: The threads that bind us from Syria to Ukraine commented on Post-Extractive Futures (Workshop-Conversation-Festival)

  • April 10, 2022

    Undisciplined Environments commented on Colonial Climates, Decolonial Futures: Reflections from Puerto Rico

  • April 10, 2022

    Constanza V commented on Colonial Climates, Decolonial Futures: Reflections from Puerto Rico

  • April 6, 2022

    Colonial Ecologies of the Half Earth - Resilience commented on Political ecology gone wrong

  • April 6, 2022

    Colonial Ecologies of the Half Earth - Resilience commented on A conversation with Rob Nixon

Follow us

facebook       twitter
E-Mail Us : undisciplinedenvironments@gmail.com

Contribute

If you want to contribute send us your text at undisciplinedenvironments@gmail.com
Find our posting guide here

About Us

We are a collective of scholars and activists oriented towards a common horizon of emancipatory social and ecological transformation. With this platform, we aim to animate a space to share, debate and critically reflect on research and activist experiences, observations, methodologies, news, events, publications, art, music and other themes and objects related to political ecology.
powered by andromedia
  • About Us
  • Essays
  • Series
  • Resources
  • Events and Calls
  • Art & multimedia
  • Contribute
go