Power, Consent, and The Body: #MeToo and The Handmaid’s Tale

Abstract

Feminist rhetorics have long been concerned with interrupting power, questioning norms, and challenging the status quo. First-wave feminists concerned themselves with not only women’s suffrage, but also with the ways in which women were portrayed in cinema and other media. We believe critical attention must continue to be paid to the relationship between media and contemporary protest. As Simone de Beauvoir writes, “It would appear...that every female human being is not necessarily a woman; to be so considered she must share in that mysterious and threatened reality known as femininity” (253). Now, more than ever, women’s concerns with rape culture, sexual assault, and sexism are making their way into public discourse. While the #MeToo movement has been a critical point of activism both on the ground and online, another axis from which women are questioning the normalization and silencing of sexual violence against women has been through television. One of the most prolific outlets has been the television series adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, which showcases the ways in which women struggle within power structures surrounding consent and the body. While Atwood’s novel was published in 1985, in the midst of second-wave feminism, and while Atwood was living in West Berlin, surrounded by the Berlin Wall (Field), the 2017 adaptation of the text, for which Atwood is a producer, is a timely response to contemporary feminist concerns.

In this article, we unpack the ways in which The Handmaid’s Tale provides a dystopic articulation of rape culture in the United States. While we relate some of the dis/connections between Margaret Atwood’s novel and its televisual articulation, we foremost discuss the ways in which the adaptation uses ritualized rape to challenge the normalization of sexual assault and sexism in American politics, law, education, and family life. Drawing on the dialectic between the #MeToo movement and the series, we discuss the ways in which contemporary protest and feminist activism has integrated key terms and concepts that draw our attention to power, consent, and the body. Feminist narratologist Susan S. Lanser argues that narratives, text-based and otherwise, must be analyzed within the social context in which, and for whom, they were produced: “[T]he authority of a given voice or text is produced from a conjunction of social and rhetorical properties. Discursive authority… is produced interactively; it must therefore be characterized with respect to specific receiving communities” (6). Drawing from feminist narratology, we dissect the rhetoric of ritual to discuss how The Handmaid’s Tale has become a critical counterpart to what has otherwise been conceptualized as a social media-driven fourth wave.