The Lavender Menace Returns

“Un-woman.” “Carpet munching gender traitor.” “That girl, that Satan, was an offense to God. She was a disgusting beast.” These are some of the descriptions given to the lesbian characters in the television adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel The Handmaid’s Tale (Hulu, 2017–). Hulu’s series, which has been renewed for a second season set to air in 2018, has received critical acclaim and hailed for its uncanny resemblance to the ideologies and policies of the Trump administration. The Republic of Gilead (formerly the United States)—a patriarchal, totalitarian, and fundamentalist Christian society—centers on human reproduction. Each Handmaid has been chosen to be an enslaved breeder because she is able to conceive a child for “Commanders” and their infertile wives. Through the combination of flashbacks to a time when life looks much as it does in the United States today, and scenes of female oppression under a tyrannical regime in Gilead, The Handmaid’s Tale uses regulatory mechanisms to reinforce a binary between men and women and to insist on the interdependence of the two sexes. In this social structure, there is no space for gays and lesbians; it is designed to be exclusively heterosexual. Gay men are hung on the outsides of buildings, their limp, dead bodies left on display as a reminder of the perversity and immorality of homosexuality. “Dyke purges” have left few gay women in Gilead. They are a modern-day lavender menace

Biology · Botany · Human sexuality · Lavender · Linguistics · Reading (process · Sociology · Psychology · Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Literary Criticism · Gender Studies · Philosophy

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  Cagri Yalkin•Consumption Markets & Culture•2019

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