Space, Power, and Resistance
Women’s Utopian Spatial Desires in The Handmaid’s Tale and The Testaments
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 7168554 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Aihua Chen (0000-0003-2208-2716, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, corresponding author), Ziyu Xiao (0000-0001-9745-9456, Huazhong University of Science and Technology) |
| Year | 2025 |
| Volume | 106 |
| Issue | 2-3 |
| Pages | 231-248 |
| Publication date | 2025-12-11 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Soundings An Interdisciplinary Journal (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0038-1861 • E-ISSN: 2161-6302 |
| Publisher | The Pennsylvania State University Press (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.5325/soundings.106.2-3.0231 |
| OpenAlex | W4417477746 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 3 |
The female protagonists in Margaret Atwood’s duology The Handmaid’s Tale and The Testaments do not surrender themselves to the dystopian world, but desire to change the status quo and act on it. Drawing on scholarship in power politics, utopian studies, and space studies, this article intends to interrogate Atwood’s attention to aligning the utopian desire with space to act out resistance and agency. It argues that although in this duology the totalitarian regime disciplines their bodies and minds through representations of space, the female protagonists have strong utopian desires for a better world, which are presented through imagining utopian spaces. Atwood underscores the importance of harboring a utopian spatial desire to hope, to act, and to change. As serious commentaries on the sociopolitical conditions of today’s world, The Handmaid’s Tale and The Testaments offer utopian hope as well as dystopian warnings to contemporary readers
Dystopia · Power (physics) · Resistance (ecology) · Scholarship · Space (punctuation) · Status quo · Contemporary Literature and Criticism · Gothic Literature and Media Analysis · Utopian, Dystopian, and Speculative Fiction
| Highly cited | No |
|---|