Torture Born

On the face of it, The Handmaid’s Tale is about the autocracy of biological essentialism and female fecundity taken to its logical extreme. Since the book’s publication, reading The Handmaid’s Tale as a warning against reproductive tyranny is as feminist as refusing to bake an apple pie. And in an age of Mike Pence and “religious freedom” laws the new Hulu series is beyond prescient, demanding a reckoning with our current political landscape even more obviously than it might have done in 1985. It feels almost mean-spirited to take it to task as it so accurately dramatizes elements of America’s evangelized collision course of reproductive repression.1 However, I do want to pose a central question about how the series mobilizes its cultural outrage. That is, in order to most effectively “warn” us against repressive reproductive futurity, does The Handmaid’s Tale marshal its own kind of neoliberal reproductive fantasies of the substance (if not the sanctity) of the nuclear family, with its roots in romantic love and melodramatic maternity? According the narrative’s emotional logic, Gilead is the most horrifying of places not only for its cruel gender tyranny but for its distortion of the most “primary” of human relationships: heterosexual love that produces biological children.2

Art · Autocracy · Democracy · Essentialism · Face (sociological concept · Human rights · Literature · Narrative · Political science · Politics · Psychoanalysis · Social science · Sociology · Torture · American Jewish Fiction Analysis · Cultural Studies and Interdisciplinary Research · Psychology · Themes in Literature Analysis · Gender Studies · Law