Sources 2 cut

1. Booker, M. Keith. The Dystopian Impulse in Modern Literature: Fiction as Social

Criticism. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1994. Print.
2. Conboy, Sheila. “Scripted, Conscripted, and Circumcised: Body Language in Margaret
Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.” Anxious Power: Reading, Writing, and Ambivalence in
Narrative by Women. Ed. Carol J. Singley and Susan Elizabeth Sweeney. New York: State
U of New York P, 1993. 349-363. Print.
3. Freibert, Lucy M. “Control and Creativity: The Politics of Risk in Margaret Atwood’s The
Handmaid’s Tale.” Critical Essays on Margaret Atwood. Ed. Judith McCombs. Boston:
G.K. Hall, 1988. 280-291. Print.
4. Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. “The Yellow Wallpaper.” The Longman Anthology of
Women’s Literature. Ed. Mary K. DeShazer. New York: Addison-Wesley Educational
Publishers, 2001. 264-274. Print.
5. Howells, Coral Ann. Margaret Atwood. 2nd ed. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.
Print.
6. Katz-Roy, Ginette. “Sexual Politics and Textual Strategies in Margaret Atwood’s The
Handmaid’s Tale.” History, Politics, Identity: Reading Literature in a Changing World. Ed.
Marija Knežević, Aleksandra Nikčević-Batrićević, and Peter Preston. Newcastle upon
Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2008. 111-133. Print.
7. Kauffman, Linda. “Special Delivery: Twenty-First-Century Epistolarity in The Handmaid’s
Tale.” Writing the Female Voice: Essays on Epistolary Literature. Ed. Elizabeth C.
Goldsmith. Boston: Northeastern UP, 1989. 221- 245. Print.
8. King, Angela. “The Prisoner of Gender: Foucault and the Disciplining of the Female
Body.” Journal of International Women’s Studies. (2004): 29-39. Google Scholar. Web. 1
Nov. 2011.
9. Langer, Jessica. “The Shapes of Dystopia: Boundaries, Hybridity and the Politics of
Power.” Science Fiction, Imperialism and the Third World: Essays on Postcolonial
Literature and Film. Ed. Ericka Hoagland, Reema Sarwal, and Andy Sawyer. Jefferson:
McFarland, 2010. 171-187. Print.
10. Myrsiades, Linda. “Law, Medicine, and the Sex Slave in Margaret Atwood’s The
Handmaid’s Tale.” Un-Disciplining Literature: Literature, Law and Culture. Ed. Kostas
Myrsiades and Linda Myrsiades. New York: Peter Lang, 1999. 219-245. Print.
11. Raschke, Debrah. “Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale: False Borders and Subtle
Subversions.” Literature, Interpretation, Theory: LIT 6.3-4 (1995): 257-268. Print.
12. Winter, Alison. “The Chemistry of Truth and the Literature of Dystopia.” Literature,
Science, Psychoanalysis, 1830-1970. Eds. Helen Small and Trudi Tate. Oxford: Oxford UP,
2003. 212-232. Print. Woolf, Virginia. “A Room of One’s Own.” The Longman Anthology
of Women’s Literature. Ed. Mary K. DeShazer. New York: Addison-Wesley Educational
Publishers, 2001. 16-72. Print.
13. Choreographies: Oppositional Strategies and Narrative Design in the Novels of Margaret
Atwood. Massachusetts: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993. Print.
14. Queen, Robin. “‘I Am Woman, Hear Me Roar’: The Importance of Linguistic Stereotype
forLesbian Identity Performances.” Language and Woman’s Place: Text and
Commentaries. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.
15. Rich, Adrienne. “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence.” Signs: Women, Sex
and Sexuality. Summer 1980: 631-660. JSTOR.
16. Rubin, Gayle. “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex.” The
Second Wave: A Feminist Reader. Linda Nicholson, ed. New York, NY: Routledge, 1997.
Print.
17. Rubin, Gayle and Judith Butler. “Sexual Traffic: Interview.” Feminism Meets Queer
Theory. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1997. Print.
18. Sinfield, Alan. Sexuality and Power. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004. Print.
19. Travis, Cheryl Brown and Jacquelyn W. White. Sexuality, Society, and Feminism.
Washington, D.C.: American Psychological Association, 2000. Print.
20. Sandra Lee Bartky
 1AC #1
"We are for breeding purposes: we aren't concubines, geisha girls, courtesans.
On the contrary: everything possible has been done to remove us from that
category .... We are two-legged wombs, that's all: sacred vessels, ambulatory
chalices" (176).

This expert is from our reading of, The Handmaids tale by Margaret Atwood,
acts as an interrogation of our current understanding of the feminine body and
the surveillance placed upon it. We see a world where the feminine bodies are
placed into categories based on their reproductive value. Where only men
control the government and determine the value or another. A world where
everything you say and everything you do is seen or heard by the Eyes. Men
have dominated this altered world but its not a dystopia, it’s a world some of
us will live to see if we don’t change the way we survey bodies. Claire and I are
calling for a critical examination of the way surveillance impacts feminine
bodies in the status quo compared to a world so close to us.
Claire Lauterbach, 3-6-2015, ("International Women's Day: How surveillance is used to assert
control," No Publication, https://www.privacyinternational.org/?q=node/503, accessed 7-12-
2015)

This Sunday is International Women's Day. You could celebrate the considerable progress in legislating for women's equal rights. You
could join a protest against political and legal inequality, discrepancies in women's access to healthcare, education and other social
goods. You could thank your mom for delivering you. Here at Privacy International, we want to commemorate the importance of this
day by looking at some of the ways surveillance technologies can be used to control women and how the fight for women's equal
rights and for privacy have more in common than you might think. Say it with spyware What could £40 get your favourite lady?
Maybe a couple dozen roses? How about a one-month subscription to FlexiSpy to track her at all times? FlexiSpy is a startlingly
invasive piece of commercial spy software to track a target's phone, capturing call, SMS data uploaded to an online account for
viewing. It is actually specifically marketed for spouses to install on their partner's phone to find out if they are being unfaithful. It
boasts that you can “Always Know...What they're seeing... What they're hearing...What they're saying...What they're doing.” Not
only does it invade a loved one's privacy, it plays on our worst fears by giving “complete monitoring control.” Of course, women can
use this product to target their partners, and FlexiSpy is one of the dozens of commercially available spy gadgets out there. But its
marketing hits on an important point when it comes to surveillance – control, specifically, complete control and power over another.
The United Nations defines violence against women as “a manifestation of historically unequal
power relations between men and women" and that "violence against women is one of the
crucial social mechanisms by which women are forced into a subordinate position compared
with men.” It calls out by name “physical, sexual and psychological violence” in the family,
general community and as perpetrated or condoned by the State. Surveillance's effect on the
psyche has been long documented. So when it comes to a man having the power to spy on a
woman, the control is not only exerted over that specific woman but falls in line with historical
and systemic issues of unequal power relations between men and women. Last October, the High Court
in Lahore, Pakistan accepted to hear the plea of a woman who accused her husband of installing a tracking device in her body.
Sughran Bibi alleged that her husband with an accomplice had affixed a tracking device inside her as she lay unconscious,
chloroformed. She pointed to other classic signs of abuseabuser signs – her husband had been blackmailing her – and brought X-rays
to prove her point that a tracking device had been inserted. In Saudi Arabia, communications providers notified male relatives or
'guardians' by SMS of whenever their wives or other 'dependents' left or arrived in country. The automatic system prompted an
outcry both in and out of the country where women are still legal minors. In case
we are tempted to think that this
only happens in certain countries with discriminatory laws or where women are less likely to
control household incomes: it doesn't. The same technologies that are used around the world to
track your pizza delivery are also used by abusive partners to keep tight control of their targets .
These are usually and overwhelmingly women. A December 2014 study by UK-based Digital-Trust quoted domestic violence
counsellors and victims' accounts of stalking by way of GPS trackers, smartphone spyware, bugs and hacking.
A series of
parliamentary answers revealed that UK police received over 10,000 reports of computers being
compromised by spyware and malware (malicious software) in one year. In parallel, researchers
have demonstrated that digital abuse frequently accompanies other forms of domestic violence .
Control is the bottom line At Privacy International, we're usually busy keeping tabs on spying by governments around the
world, including the activities of GCHQ, the NSA and their Five Eyes partners, looking to develop mass surveillance systems or use
powerful spyware to intimidate their supposed opponents. At the heart of those issues, and of the surveillance cases mentioned
above, is the same principle: that surveillance is about control. The interpersonal, tech-enabled spying described above results
mainly from the popularisation of surveillance as a legitimate way of engaging with another human being, and the unequal
economic, political and social status women still overwhelmingly occupy to varying degrees worldwide. Or, more precisely, the many
obstacles to addressing those problems that – from lack of political will to educational inequality, to health inequality – are too
numerous to discuss here. The fact that globally we still even legislate for women's, rather than men's, inclusion in various benefits
like equal pay is the strongest evidence that exclusion is still the default. Men can and do have their privacy invaded. Technologies
like FlexiSpy can be used to target men. There are also particularly strong stigmas that prevent men from reporting domestic
violence – including the invasive surveillance and stalking is commonly associated with it. While
surveillance of anyone,
no matter their gender, is problematic, the surveillance of women by men reinforces existing
power imbalances. Take, for example, Girls Around Me. The winner if not a strong contender in the unofficial 'creepiest app'
awards, the program detects women who, by voluntarily sharing their GPS location data with social media app Foursquare, 'check in'
to locations like restaurants and cinemas in a user’s neighborhood. Girls Around Me does what it says on the tin: displays a list of
local ladies, helpfully geocoded, and potentially any data on their social media pages. It's not surveillance, per se, but definitely a
privacy-invasive use of consumer data according to Foursquare. Girls Around Me is called that for a reason, though technically a user
can search for both men and women – maybe if only to give its mostly male users favourable “guy-to-girl ratios”. .Not all of these
latest technologies are surveillance technologies; but all are invasions of the right to human right to privacy. For instance, it is
overwhelmingly the explicit private images of women that former intimate partners post against their wishes to 'revenge porn'
websites. This latest development in tech-enabled sexism continues a long history of literally stripping bare women's right to control
how and why their bodies are displayed.Personal, political privacy. The right to privacy is conceived of as a
protection against potential abuses by the state. Yet state surveillance, too, when its target is a
woman, often takes a specific gendered form. Security agents who spied on Colombian
journalist Claudia Duque and her communications were instructed to threaten to abduct and
rape her daughter; a high-ranking official was convicted of Duque's 'psychological torture' late
last year. Azerbaijani journalist Khadija Ismayilova, noted for her high-level investigations into government corruption, had
several of her explicit photographs sent to her in the post with a letter calling her a 'whore' and telling her to 'behave' (an
unfortunately frequent demand of 'troublemaking' women). An explicit video of Ismayilova allegedly recorded by hidden camera
was posted online when she refused to desist. Azerbaijani authorities are currently detaining Ismailova on vague charges.“The
personal is political” – to repeat the feminist adage. Privacy is both. The idea that 'a man's home is his castle', an early manifestation
of the right to privacy based on preserving (traditionally men's) property rights and protecting against undue scrutiny has been used
to deny women safety from domestic abuse in their own homes. Women can and should reclaim the 'right to privacy' to guard
against unwanted intrusion into their lives to give them ultimate control over their information, bodies, and lives. Surveillance
technologies are impersonal in the way they operate but surveillance can be conducted against
women to specifically target them as such, whether by an angry lover or an angrier state.
Physical and digital surveillance and harassment of women thrives because monitoring others'
daily lives is widely accepted as as a legitimate practice or at least 'not that bad' – we do
voluntarily forklift loads of our data into social media sites – and because of the overt or implied
desire to control women or at least view them as auxiliary to men (see: all of human history). As privacy
advocates, we can at least work on one side of the equation. Happy International Women's Day – now go call your mother
“My red skirt is hitched up to my waist, though no higher. Below it the
Commander is fucking. What he is fucking is the lower part of my body. I do not
say making love because this is not what he's doing. Copulating too would be
inaccurate, because it would imply two people and only one is involved. Nor does
rape cover it: nothing is going on here that I haven't signed up for. . . . [The
Commander] is preoccupied, like a man humming to himself in the shower without
knowing he's humming; like a man who has other things on his mind. It's as if he's
somewhere else, waiting for himself to come, drumming his fingers on the table
while he waits.”  (121-122).

Margaret Atwood’s society is predicated off the ideas of rape culture. The fact that
the first question we always ask is “what was she wearing?” or “was she sober
enough to say no?” Is taken to a new level when the victims believe they are
objects to be used. They attend the “ceremony” where they are raped in hopes of
being impregnated, but their belief is that they asked for it and this is what they
signed up for. The “angels” have taken away all weapons, no rope, no razor
blades, in fear that they will kill themselves when they realize what they are doing.
They don’t even have the right to take their own life. They are kept alive to suffer.
Helen Jones, 2005, (" No Publication, http://www.surveillance-and-
society.org/articles2(4)/visiblerights.pdf, accessed 7-12-2015)

We live in a world where our lives are tracked, monitored and controlled to a degree that would
surprise even Orwell. We are rich in data-knowledge about human movement and behaviour,
yet despite this mass of knowledge, impunity for violence against women continues. Statistical
details abound. The collection of data is of course important but only in so far as it can be put to
practical use. Data flows and accompanied technology are not valuable merely as things in
themselves. The unresponsive eye of the CCTV camera cannot stop violence; it can only observe
and record. In the same way, observing and recording violence against women is only valuable if
it has a human result: if it works to end violence. This article examines the intersection of
surveillance and privacy in relation to violence against women and how knowledge constructed
from such surveillance affects the privacy of the violated and the violator. The article also
considers campaigning as a vehicle for surveillance of nation states. Women’s rights groups are
increasingly utilising human rights instruments to help illuminate violence against women but it
is important to note that in the creation of much international human rights law, women,
because of their sex, were excluded from participating in its early creation (Charlesworth, 1994).
This has resulted in the invisibility of gender issues, creating and shielding gender-based abuses
from public scrutiny and public condemnation (Amnesty International, 2004). Privacy may be
held to 1 Institute of Culture, Gender and the City, Manchester Metropolitan University, UK.
mailto:h.jones@mmu.ac.uk Jones: Visible Rights Surveillance & Society 2(4) 590 be a human
right, one that many people strive for (Lyon, 2002), but the concept is also a contested one
frequently “based on concepts of individualism and separation … [that] applies a 19th century
conceptual framework to a 21st century problem” (Stalder, 2002: 122). Rarely is gender seen as
a salient variable but for many women, privacy is little more than the right of men to abuse
women. We know that domestic violence is the major cause of death and disability for women
aged 16 to 44 and that it accounts for more death and ill-health than cancer or traffic accidents
(Council of Europe, 2002). What is the use of such data? In their 5th Periodic Report to the
United Nations CEDAW Committee the Russian government estimated 14,000 women were
killed by their partners or relatives in 1999, yet the country still has no law specifically
addressing domestic violence. A UN expert on CEDAW, Aurora de Dios, was cited in Crawford
(1998) as asking a group of women to guess in which country a woman suffered from violence
every 20 minutes. She surprised the group by revealing that the country was Sweden. In Sweden
the ideological imperative to be seen as the most gender equal nation within Europe has been
an important issue. The early to mid 1990s saw a feminist challenge to the illusion of Swedish
democracy. Elman (2001:39) has argued how this illusion “rested on the denial of violence
against women”. Across the globe there may have been an explosion of paper rights for women,
the fact remains that women are routinely ignored and rendered invisible whilst subjected to
torture, starvation, rape and mutilation, despite the fact that we have international documents
which mandate the equality of women. Rape, as a weapon of war, has been seen in every region
of the world. Geraldine Brooks (1995: 183) discusses how during the 1991 Gulf war, Kurdish
women were raped by Iraqi soldiers “as part of the regime of torture ... Others had been raped
as a means of torturing their imprisoned fathers, brothers or husbands”. Not only were women
systematically raped they were filmed whilst being raped. The dehumanisation of the woman
through this process is used to persecute the community to which they belong. This highlights
the paradox of individual women’s invisibility in the face of systematic surveillance and abuse.
Her individuality is of no importance: in this context any woman would do. Without a real
commitment of political will to recognise such abuse, the invisibility of violence against women
in the face of overwhelming evidence continues. The paradox of individual women’s invisibility
in the face of systematic surveillance and abuse is epitomised in the example of Afghani women
under Taliban rule. Under the Taliban, a brutal regime was constituted that oppressed and
terrorised Afghan men, women and children. The organisation, Human Rights Watch, argue that
women have borne the brunt of this violence: women have suffered massive, systematic, and
unrelenting human rights abuses that have permeated every aspect of their lives … on the basis
of both gender and ethnicity. (Human Rights Watch, 2001:2) Under such a regime women only
became visible through rule-breaking. Women who had sex outside of marriage or were accused
of being prostitutes were executed. Married women who were raped were deemed to have
been unfaithful and faced being stoned to death. Girls were Jones: Visible Rights Surveillance &
Society 2(4) 591 only allowed to attend school until the age of 9 years old while women were
banned from universities and not allowed to work. The Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and
Prevention of Vice enforced restrictions against women through public beatings. Deprived of the
means of earning a living, many women, especially widows, were reduced to begging on the
street to feed themselves and their children, relying on being given or buying mouldy bread or
other unfit food. Forbidden from leaving home alone, unless they were accompanied by a male
relative, women were forced to wear the all-encompassing burka, a top-to-toe veil and gown
that created invisible, subservient nonentities who had to walk three paces behind the man. It
has been argued that “The Northern Alliance (NA) may be viewed by the West as a great
improvement on the Taliban, but Afghan women do not see it that way. In 1992, after the NA
entered Kabul and other cities, it embarked on a spree of murder, rape, plunder and torture,
attacking men and women from 7 to seventy. They killed more that 50,000 people in Kabul
alone between 1992 and 1996” (The Guardian, 7 March 2002). Just imagine, 50,000 people; that
would more than fill a football stadium. Indeed, many of the executions took place in sporting
stadia, under full public scrutiny. Rendered individually invisible, yet collectively constantly
monitored for rule-breaking, the women behind the burka, fought back. Foucault (1977)
suggests that power is always accompanied by resistance and in Afghanistan the Revolutionary
Association of Women of Afghanistan (RAWA)2 used weapons not of destruction but of
freedom. For example, they held illegal educational classes for girls and secretly photographed
human rights violations to inform the West of the atrocities of the Taliban: the surveyed became
the surveyors. Generating knowledge and transmitting knowledge are powerful weapons. RAWA
taught women about basic human rights and educated them about the position of women in
other countries. They also advocated the use of nail polish and lipstick – these symbols of
femininity were seen as powerful tools against the oppression they faced. However, women
caught defying their subordination, perhaps by wearing lipstick under the burka, faced a flogging
or had their fingernails pulled out for committing such a ‘crime’. RAWA activists speak of the
irony of the burka. A tool of oppression, of rendering women invisible, the burka provided
privacy from surveillance and was used to conceal the activities of RAWA activists smuggling
materials into the secret schoolrooms. The activities of RAWA illustrate how ‘invisible’ women
can resist. But the way women are perceived affects their human rights. Made invisible by the
burka, under the Taliban they were treated, at best, as though they were not there, as though
they did not exist. Many of these atrocities continue. Amnesty International argue that in the
power vacuum that has existed since the fall of the Taliban in November 2001, “armed groups
have abducted, raped and abused women and girls with impunity” (2004: 57).
Recommendations from the organisation Human Rights Watch include the demand that the
Taliban and other political factions be held accountable for their “massive and systematic
violations of women’s human rights” (Human Rights Watch, 2001:4) 2 http://www.rawa.org
Jones: Visible Rights Surveillance & Society 2(4) 592 The denial of rights was written on the
bodies of women in Afghanistan, in the form of the burka but this was not a hopeless cause.
Women resisted the violence and women continue to strive for their rights. But a word of
caution is necessary here about what is responsible for the violence and denial of rights. The
burka is just an item of clothing. In itself it is not violent or abusive. It is the meaning that is
attached to the burka that is important and the power of those who impose that meaning. Many
women behind the burka and many women without the burka live in terror. Outside of Islamic
fundamentalism, women are also objectified; the burka is nothing more than another tool that
has been used to oppress women. In constructing identity, symbols such as clothing gives us a
location within society, it links us and the society in which we live. Our bodies are mediums
through which we present ourselves to the world. Foucault has suggested: The body is directly
involved in a political field; power relations have an immediate hold upon it; they invest it, mark
it, train it, torture it, force it to carry out tasks, to perform ceremonies, to emit signs. (Foucault,
1977:25) Our bodies may present the uniqueness of an individual but, through being observed,
monitored and controlled, they also serve to demonstrate collective identities. Seen in this way,
our bodies are projects which may claim or subvert identity; alternatively, control over the body
may be taken and identity negated. The body, as represented within any particular culture, will
reflect the values and anxieties of that culture. To use the example of Afghanistan, the burka
provides a symbol of the anxieties about the strict social boundaries that existed between men
and women. In the West there are assumed to be more relaxed boundaries. But, across the
globe, violence continues. After military conflicts have ended, women continue to endure
violence. The private realm of the home, free from surveillance and outside interference,
provides the privacy necessary for domestic violence. The World Health Organisation suggests
that “in many countries that have suffered violent conflict, the rates of interpersonal violence
remain high even after the cessation of hostilities – among other reasons because of the way
violence has become more socially acceptable” (2002: 15). Even where the end of hostilities is
brought by peacekeeping forces women are not safe. The power of the military to control the
peace extends to controlling the abuse of women. Amnesty International provide examples of
Kosovo where women have been trafficked into the country for forced prostitution by the
military, Somalia where a teenage girl was bought as a birthday present for a Belgian
paratrooper and reports of sexual violence committed by Italian peacekeeping forces in
Mozambique (Amnesty International, 2004:54-5). Nation states have duties under international
law to respect, protect and fulfil women’s rights: in other words, to take effective steps to stop
violence against women. Governments continue to fail to demonstrate due diligence, regardless
of the mass of information that is known. On a local level, justice systems often fail to deliver
justice despite clear evidence. Although legislation may exist to protect women in theory, social
tolerance of violence, cultural norms and a lack of political will, often combine to nullify the law
in practice. Invisible women suffer invisible violence and violators act with impunity, because
police forces are uninterested, justice systems are Jones: Visible Rights Surveillance & Society
2(4) 593 expensive and are ridden with discriminatory attitudes. An example of this can be
found in Spain when, in 1995, Rita Margarete Rogerio was raped by a police officer. Despite a
lower court finding it “luminously clear” that she had been raped, the Supreme Court acquitted
the implicated officers (Amnesty International, 2004: 83). International scrutiny is therefore
useful in holding states to account and the creation of the International Criminal Court has
increased the potential for crimes of violence against women to be addressed. Women’s rights
groups recognise the limitations, not only of local level legislation, but also of international
conventions, treaties and courts to protect women from violence. Fortunately campaigning by
women’s rights activists continues to scrutinize and challenge violence against women. Violence
against women exists everywhere but it is not an inevitable feature of life for all. The power to
invade the private realm of women’s bodies is not easily curtailed by scrutiny and surveillance or
by policies and legislation but campaigns are having an impact. Whether the violence is
committed in war, in terror, by governments, by ‘peacekeepers’ or by husbands in the privacy of
the home, what is known is that violence against women, throughout the globe, has become
more visible, due to the challenges from women speaking out and demanding to break the
silence of privacy that underpins violence against women. Privacy is sustained by lack of
accountability at the level of the state, the community and the individual. Only by opening each
level up to scrutiny will violence against women begin to be achieved.
This society forces women to have babies in order to keep the world populated,
but they are not allowed to keep their children. Children are taken away where
men are created to be patriarchs and girl are turned into more means or
production.

“I'm running, with her, holding her hand, pulling, dragging her through the
bracken, she's only half awake. . . . I pull her to the ground and roll on top of her to
cover her, shield her. Quiet, I say again, my face is wet, sweat or tears. . . . I curl
myself around her, keeping my hand over her mouth. It's to late, we come apart,
my arms are held, and the edges go dark .... I see her, going away from me,
through the trees which are already turning, red and yellow, holding her arms to
me, being carried away.” (96-97)

Thus Claire and I, advocate that we should substantially curtail its surveillance
of the feminine body through the narration and discussion of Margaret
Atwood’s science fiction novel The Handmaids Tale.
Modules
Straight up Gender/Feminist POV
 Test 1ac
(IDK I PUT ALL THE CARDS WE HAVE THAT WE TALKED ABOUT IN HERE IN NO ORDER BUT ITS
2AM AND I NEED SLEEP SO THIS IS WHAT WE HAVE FOR NOW FML)

"We are for breeding purposes: we aren't concubines, geisha girls, courtesans.
On the contrary: everything possible has been done to remove us from that
category .... We are two-legged wombs, that's all: sacred vessels, ambulatory
chalices" (176).

This excerpt is from our reading of, The Handmaids tale by Margaret Atwood,
acts as an interrogation of our current understanding of the feminine body and
the surveillance placed upon it. We see a world where the feminine bodies are
placed into categories based on their reproductive value. Where only men
control the government and determine the value or another. A world where
everything you say and everything you do is seen or heard by the Eyes. Men
have dominated this altered world but its not a dystopia, it’s a world some of
us will live to see if we don’t change the way we survey bodies. Claire and I are
calling for a critical examination of the way surveillance impacts feminine
bodies in the status quo compared to a world so close to us.
Margaret Atwood 2010 (October 16, 2010, L/N, “Saturday Edition 1; National Edition Stranger
than fiction; Twenty-five years after its publication, Margaret Atwood considers the prescient
nature of The Handmaid's Tale”, Accessed 7/14/15, EHS MKS)
Twenty-five years ago my novel The Handmaid's Tale was published. That was in 1985, but 1986 in the UK and the United States. I
had started this book several years earlier, but had been frightened by it and had set it aside in favour of something less bizarre. But
in 1984 I stopped dithering and tackled The Handmaid's Tale head-on. Writing it gave me a strange feeling, like sliding on river ice -
exhilarating, but unbalancing. How thin is this ice? How far can I go? How much trouble am I in? What's down there if I fall? These
writerly questions were reflections of more general questions about the position of women. How thin is the ice on which supposedly
"liberated" modern Western women stand? How far can they go? How much trouble are they in? What's down there if they fall?
There's yet another set of questions underlying the book. If you were attempting a totalitarian takeover of the United States, how
would you do it? What form would such a government take? How much social instability would it take before people would
renounce their liberties in a trade-off for safety? Since totalitarianism has attempted to control reproduction - limiting births,
demanding births, specifying who can marry whom - how would all that play out for women? My
rules for The
Handmaid's Tale were simple: I would not put into it anything that humankind had not already
done, somewhere, or for which it did not have the tools. As for the strictures on clothing and
sexual behaviour, these are so ancient and pervasive that our present freewheeling sartorial era
seems like a mere blip. The cover-ups worn by the women in The Handmaid's Tale have been
variously interpreted as Catholic (as in nuns) or Muslim (as in burkas). The truth is that they
were inspired by the Old Dutch Cleanser figure of my childhood, but they are also simply old. I
prefaced the novel with three quotations. The first is from the Bible - the passage in which the
two wives of Jacob use their female slaves as baby-producers for themselves - and ought to
warn the reader against the dangers in applying every word in that document literally. The
second is from Swift's A Modest Proposal, alerting us to the fact that a straight-faced but
satirical account - such as Swift's suggestion that the Irish poverty of his times could be
alleviated by selling and eating babies - is not necessarily a recipe. The third states a human
truth: we don't prohibit things that nobody would ever want to do anyway, since all prohibitions
are founded in human desire.

“My red skirt is hitched up to my waist, though no higher. Below it the

Commander is fucking. What he is fucking is the lower part of my body. I do not
say making love because this is not what he's doing. Copulating too would be
inaccurate, because it would imply two people and only one is involved. Nor does
rape cover it: nothing is going on here that I haven't signed up for. . . . [The
Commander] is preoccupied, like a man humming to himself in the shower without
knowing he's humming; like a man who has other things on his mind. It's as if he's
somewhere else, waiting for himself to come, drumming his fingers on the table
while he waits.”  (121-122).

Margaret Atwood’s society is predicated off the ideas of rape culture. The fact that
the first question we always ask is “what was she wearing?” or “was she sober
enough to say no?” Is taken to a new level when the victims believe they are
objects to be used. They attend the “ceremony” where they are raped in hopes of
being impregnated, but their belief is that they asked for it and this is what they
signed up for. The “angels” have taken away all weapons, no rope, no razor
blades, in fear that they will kill themselves when they realize what they are doing.
They don’t even have the right to take their own life. They are kept alive to suffer.
Helen Jones, 2005, (" No Publication, http://www.surveillance-and-
society.org/articles2(4)/visiblerights.pdf, accessed 7-12-2015)

We live in a world where our lives are tracked, monitored and controlled to a degree that would
surprise even Orwell. We are rich in data-knowledge about human movement and behaviour,
yet despite this mass of knowledge, impunity for violence against women continues. Statistical
details abound. The collection of data is of course important but only in so far as it can be put to
practical use. Data flows and accompanied technology are not valuable merely as things in
themselves. The unresponsive eye of the CCTV camera cannot stop violence; it can only observe
and record. In the same way, observing and recording violence against women is only valuable if
it has a human result: if it works to end violence. This article examines the intersection of
surveillance and privacy in relation to violence against women and how knowledge constructed
from such surveillance affects the privacy of the violated and the violator. The article also
considers campaigning as a vehicle for surveillance of nation states. Women’s rights groups are
increasingly utilising human rights instruments to help illuminate violence against women but it
is important to note that in the creation of much international human rights law, women,
because of their sex, were excluded from participating in its early creation (Charlesworth, 1994).
This has resulted in the invisibility of gender issues, creating and shielding gender-based abuses
from public scrutiny and public condemnation (Amnesty International, 2004). Privacy may be
held to 1 Institute of Culture, Gender and the City, Manchester Metropolitan University, UK.
mailto:h.jones@mmu.ac.uk Jones: Visible Rights Surveillance & Society 2(4) 590 be a human
right, one that many people strive for (Lyon, 2002), but the concept is also a contested one
frequently “based on concepts of individualism and separation … [that] applies a 19th century
conceptual framework to a 21st century problem” (Stalder, 2002: 122). Rarely is gender seen as
a salient variable but for many women, privacy is little more than the right of men to abuse
women. We know that domestic violence is the major cause of death and disability for women
aged 16 to 44 and that it accounts for more death and ill-health than cancer or traffic accidents
(Council of Europe, 2002). What is the use of such data? In their 5th Periodic Report to the
United Nations CEDAW Committee the Russian government estimated 14,000 women were
killed by their partners or relatives in 1999, yet the country still has no law specifically
addressing domestic violence. A UN expert on CEDAW, Aurora de Dios, was cited in Crawford
(1998) as asking a group of women to guess in which country a woman suffered from violence
every 20 minutes. She surprised the group by revealing that the country was Sweden. In Sweden
the ideological imperative to be seen as the most gender equal nation within Europe has been
an important issue. The early to mid 1990s saw a feminist challenge to the illusion of Swedish
democracy. Elman (2001:39) has argued how this illusion “rested on the denial of violence
against women”. Across the globe there may have been an explosion of paper rights for women,
the fact remains that women are routinely ignored and rendered invisible whilst subjected to
torture, starvation, rape and mutilation, despite the fact that we have international documents
which mandate the equality of women. Rape, as a weapon of war, has been seen in every region
of the world. Geraldine Brooks (1995: 183) discusses how during the 1991 Gulf war, Kurdish
women were raped by Iraqi soldiers “as part of the regime of torture ... Others had been raped
as a means of torturing their imprisoned fathers, brothers or husbands”. Not only were women
systematically raped they were filmed whilst being raped. The dehumanisation of the woman
through this process is used to persecute the community to which they belong. This highlights
the paradox of individual women’s invisibility in the face of systematic surveillance and abuse.
Her individuality is of no importance: in this context any woman would do. Without a real
commitment of political will to recognise such abuse, the invisibility of violence against women
in the face of overwhelming evidence continues. The paradox of individual women’s invisibility
in the face of systematic surveillance and abuse is epitomised in the example of Afghani women
under Taliban rule. Under the Taliban, a brutal regime was constituted that oppressed and
terrorised Afghan men, women and children. The organisation, Human Rights Watch, argue that
women have borne the brunt of this violence: women have suffered massive, systematic, and
unrelenting human rights abuses that have permeated every aspect of their lives … on the basis
of both gender and ethnicity. (Human Rights Watch, 2001:2) Under such a regime women only
became visible through rule-breaking. Women who had sex outside of marriage or were accused
of being prostitutes were executed. Married women who were raped were deemed to have
been unfaithful and faced being stoned to death. Girls were Jones: Visible Rights Surveillance &
Society 2(4) 591 only allowed to attend school until the age of 9 years old while women were
banned from universities and not allowed to work. The Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and
Prevention of Vice enforced restrictions against women through public beatings. Deprived of the
means of earning a living, many women, especially widows, were reduced to begging on the
street to feed themselves and their children, relying on being given or buying mouldy bread or
other unfit food. Forbidden from leaving home alone, unless they were accompanied by a male
relative, women were forced to wear the all-encompassing burka, a top-to-toe veil and gown
that created invisible, subservient nonentities who had to walk three paces behind the man. It
has been argued that “The Northern Alliance (NA) may be viewed by the West as a great
improvement on the Taliban, but Afghan women do not see it that way. In 1992, after the NA
entered Kabul and other cities, it embarked on a spree of murder, rape, plunder and torture,
attacking men and women from 7 to seventy. They killed more that 50,000 people in Kabul
alone between 1992 and 1996” (The Guardian, 7 March 2002). Just imagine, 50,000 people; that
would more than fill a football stadium. Indeed, many of the executions took place in sporting
stadia, under full public scrutiny. Rendered individually invisible, yet collectively constantly
monitored for rule-breaking, the women behind the burka, fought back. Foucault (1977)
suggests that power is always accompanied by resistance and in Afghanistan the Revolutionary
Association of Women of Afghanistan (RAWA)2 used weapons not of destruction but of
freedom. For example, they held illegal educational classes for girls and secretly photographed
human rights violations to inform the West of the atrocities of the Taliban: the surveyed became
the surveyors. Generating knowledge and transmitting knowledge are powerful weapons. RAWA
taught women about basic human rights and educated them about the position of women in
other countries. They also advocated the use of nail polish and lipstick – these symbols of
femininity were seen as powerful tools against the oppression they faced. However, women
caught defying their subordination, perhaps by wearing lipstick under the burka, faced a flogging
or had their fingernails pulled out for committing such a ‘crime’. RAWA activists speak of the
irony of the burka. A tool of oppression, of rendering women invisible, the burka provided
privacy from surveillance and was used to conceal the activities of RAWA activists smuggling
materials into the secret schoolrooms. The activities of RAWA illustrate how ‘invisible’ women
can resist. But the way women are perceived affects their human rights. Made invisible by the
burka, under the Taliban they were treated, at best, as though they were not there, as though
they did not exist. Many of these atrocities continue. Amnesty International argue that in the
power vacuum that has existed since the fall of the Taliban in November 2001, “armed groups
have abducted, raped and abused women and girls with impunity” (2004: 57).
Recommendations from the organisation Human Rights Watch include the demand that the
Taliban and other political factions be held accountable for their “massive and systematic
violations of women’s human rights” (Human Rights Watch, 2001:4) 2 http://www.rawa.org
Jones: Visible Rights Surveillance & Society 2(4) 592 The denial of rights was written on the
bodies of women in Afghanistan, in the form of the burka but this was not a hopeless cause.
Women resisted the violence and women continue to strive for their rights. But a word of
caution is necessary here about what is responsible for the violence and denial of rights. The
burka is just an item of clothing. In itself it is not violent or abusive. It is the meaning that is
attached to the burka that is important and the power of those who impose that meaning. Many
women behind the burka and many women without the burka live in terror. Outside of Islamic
fundamentalism, women are also objectified; the burka is nothing more than another tool that
has been used to oppress women. In constructing identity, symbols such as clothing gives us a
location within society, it links us and the society in which we live. Our bodies are mediums
through which we present ourselves to the world. Foucault has suggested: The body is directly
involved in a political field; power relations have an immediate hold upon it; they invest it, mark
it, train it, torture it, force it to carry out tasks, to perform ceremonies, to emit signs. (Foucault,
1977:25) Our bodies may present the uniqueness of an individual but, through being observed,
monitored and controlled, they also serve to demonstrate collective identities. Seen in this way,
our bodies are projects which may claim or subvert identity; alternatively, control over the body
may be taken and identity negated. The body, as represented within any particular culture, will
reflect the values and anxieties of that culture. To use the example of Afghanistan, the burka
provides a symbol of the anxieties about the strict social boundaries that existed between men
and women. In the West there are assumed to be more relaxed boundaries. But, across the
globe, violence continues. After military conflicts have ended, women continue to endure
violence. The private realm of the home, free from surveillance and outside interference,
provides the privacy necessary for domestic violence. The World Health Organisation suggests
that “in many countries that have suffered violent conflict, the rates of interpersonal violence
remain high even after the cessation of hostilities – among other reasons because of the way
violence has become more socially acceptable” (2002: 15). Even where the end of hostilities is
brought by peacekeeping forces women are not safe. The power of the military to control the
peace extends to controlling the abuse of women. Amnesty International provide examples of
Kosovo where women have been trafficked into the country for forced prostitution by the
military, Somalia where a teenage girl was bought as a birthday present for a Belgian
paratrooper and reports of sexual violence committed by Italian peacekeeping forces in
Mozambique (Amnesty International, 2004:54-5). Nation states have duties under international
law to respect, protect and fulfil women’s rights: in other words, to take effective steps to stop
violence against women. Governments continue to fail to demonstrate due diligence, regardless
of the mass of information that is known. On a local level, justice systems often fail to deliver
justice despite clear evidence. Although legislation may exist to protect women in theory, social
tolerance of violence, cultural norms and a lack of political will, often combine to nullify the law
in practice. Invisible women suffer invisible violence and violators act with impunity, because
police forces are uninterested, justice systems are Jones: Visible Rights Surveillance & Society
2(4) 593 expensive and are ridden with discriminatory attitudes. An example of this can be
found in Spain when, in 1995, Rita Margarete Rogerio was raped by a police officer. Despite a
lower court finding it “luminously clear” that she had been raped, the Supreme Court acquitted
the implicated officers (Amnesty International, 2004: 83). International scrutiny is therefore
useful in holding states to account and the creation of the International Criminal Court has
increased the potential for crimes of violence against women to be addressed. Women’s rights
groups recognise the limitations, not only of local level legislation, but also of international
conventions, treaties and courts to protect women from violence. Fortunately campaigning by
women’s rights activists continues to scrutinize and challenge violence against women. Violence
against women exists everywhere but it is not an inevitable feature of life for all. The power to
invade the private realm of women’s bodies is not easily curtailed by scrutiny and surveillance or
by policies and legislation but campaigns are having an impact. Whether the violence is
committed in war, in terror, by governments, by ‘peacekeepers’ or by husbands in the privacy of
the home, what is known is that violence against women, throughout the globe, has become
more visible, due to the challenges from women speaking out and demanding to break the
silence of privacy that underpins violence against women. Privacy is sustained by lack of
accountability at the level of the state, the community and the individual. Only by opening each
level up to scrutiny will violence against women begin to be achieved.
Thus ____ and I, advocate that we should substantially curtail the Eye’s
surveillance of the feminine body.

This society forces women to have babies in order to keep the world populated,
but they are not allowed to keep their children. Children are taken away where
men are created to be patriarchs and girl are turned into more means or
production.
CARD SHOULD BE HERE MAYBE?????

“I'm running, with her, holding her hand, pulling, dragging her through the
bracken, she's only half awake. . . . I pull her to the ground and roll on top of her to
cover her, shield her. Quiet, I say again, my face is wet, sweat or tears. . . . I curl
myself around her, keeping my hand over her mouth. It's to late, we come apart,
my arms are held, and the edges go dark .... I see her, going away from me,
through the trees which are already turning, red and yellow, holding her arms to
me, being carried away.” (96-97)

“real world card”

Claire Lauterbach, 3-6-2015, ("International Women's Day: How surveillance is used to assert
control," No Publication, https://www.privacyinternational.org/?q=node/503, accessed 7-12-
2015)

This Sunday is International Women's Day. You could celebrate the considerable progress in
legislating for women's equal rights. You could join a protest against political and legal
inequality, discrepancies in women's access to healthcare, education and other social goods.
You could thank your mom for delivering you.
Here at Privacy International, we want to commemorate the importance of this day by looking
at some of the ways surveillance technologies can be used to control women and how the fight
for women's equal rights and for privacy have more in common than you might think.
Say it with spyware
What could £40 get your favourite lady? Maybe a couple dozen roses? How about a one-month
subscription to FlexiSpy to track her at all times?
FlexiSpy is a startlingly invasive piece of commercial spy software to track a target's phone,
capturing call, SMS data uploaded to an online account for viewing. It is actually specifically
marketed for spouses to install on their partner's phone to find out if they are being unfaithful.
It boasts that you can “Always Know...What they're seeing... What they're hearing...What
they're saying...What they're doing.” Not only does it invade a loved one's privacy, it plays on
our worst fears by giving “complete monitoring control.”
Of course, women can use this product to target their partners, and FlexiSpy is one of the
dozens of commercially available spy gadgets out there. But its marketing hits on an important
point when it comes to surveillance – control, specifically, complete control and power over
another.
The United Nations defines violence against women as “a manifestation of historically unequal
power relations between men and women" and that "violence against women is one of the
crucial social mechanisms by which women are forced into a subordinate position compared
with men.” It calls out by name “physical, sexual and psychological violence” in the family,
general community and as perpetrated or condoned by the State.
Surveillance's effect on the psyche has been long documented. So when it comes to a man
having the power to spy on a woman, the control is not only exerted over that specific woman
but falls in line with historical and systemic issues of unequal power relations between men and
women.
Last October, the High Court in Lahore, Pakistan accepted to hear the plea of a woman who
accused her husband of installing a tracking device in her body. Sughran Bibi alleged that her
husband with an accomplice had affixed a tracking device inside her as she lay unconscious,
chloroformed. She pointed to other classic signs of abuseabuser signs – her husband had been
blackmailing her – and brought X-rays to prove her point that a tracking device had been
inserted.
In Saudi Arabia, communications providers notified male relatives or 'guardians' by SMS of
whenever their wives or other 'dependents' left or arrived in country. The automatic system
prompted an outcry both in and out of the country where women are still legal minors.
In case we are tempted to think that this only happens in certain countries with discriminatory
laws or where women are less likely to control household incomes: it doesn't.
The same technologies that are used around the world to track your pizza delivery are also used
by abusive partners to keep tight control of their targets. These are usually and overwhelmingly
women. A December 2014 study by UK-based Digital-Trust quoted domestic violence
counsellors and victims' accounts of stalking by way of GPS trackers, smartphone spyware, bugs
and hacking. A series of parliamentary answers revealed that UK police received over 10,000
reports of computers being compromised by spyware and malware (malicious software) in one
year. In parallel, researchers have demonstrated that  digital abuse frequently accompanies
other forms of domestic violence.
Control is the bottom line
At Privacy International, we're usually busy keeping tabs on spying by governments around the
world, including the activities of GCHQ, the NSA and their Five Eyes partners, looking to develop
mass surveillance systems or use powerful spyware to intimidate their supposed opponents.
At the heart of those issues, and of the surveillance cases mentioned above, is the same
principle: that surveillance is about control. The interpersonal, tech-enabled spying described
above results mainly from the popularisation of surveillance as a legitimate way of engaging
with another human being, and the unequal economic, political and social status women still
overwhelmingly occupy to varying degrees worldwide. Or, more precisely, the many obstacles to
addressing those problems that – from lack of political will to educational inequality, to health
inequality – are too numerous to discuss here. The fact that globally we still even legislate for
women's, rather than men's, inclusion in various benefits like equal pay is the strongest
evidence that exclusion is still the default.
Men can and do have their privacy invaded. Technologies like FlexiSpy can be used to target
men. There are also particularly strong stigmas that prevent men from reporting domestic
violence – including the invasive surveillance and stalking is commonly associated with it.
While surveillance of anyone, no matter their gender, is problematic, the surveillance of women
by men reinforces existing power imbalances.
Take, for example, Girls Around Me. The winner if not a strong contender in the unofficial
'creepiest app' awards, the program detects women who, by voluntarily sharing their GPS
location data with social media app Foursquare, 'check in' to locations like restaurants and
cinemas in a user’s neighborhood.
Girls Around Me does what it says on the tin: displays a list of local ladies, helpfully geocoded,
and potentially any data on their social media pages. It's not surveillance, per se, but definitely a
privacy-invasive use of consumer data according to Foursquare. Girls Around Me is called that
for a reason, though technically a user can search for both men and women – maybe if only to
give its mostly male users favourable “guy-to-girl ratios”. .Not all of these latest technologies are
surveillance technologies; but all are invasions of the right to human right to privacy. For
instance, it is overwhelmingly the explicit private images of women that former intimate
partners post against their wishes to 'revenge porn' websites. This latest development in tech-
enabled sexism continues a long history of literally stripping bare women's right to control how
and why their bodies are displayed.Personal, political privacy. The right to privacy is conceived
of as a protection against potential abuses by the state. Yet state surveillance, too, when its
target is a woman, often takes a specific gendered form. Security agents who spied on
Colombian journalist Claudia Duque and her communications were instructed to  threaten to
abduct and rape her daughter ; a high-ranking official was convicted of Duque's 'psychological
torture' late last year. Azerbaijani journalist Khadija Ismayilova, noted for her high-level
investigations into government corruption, had several of her explicit photographs sent to her in
the post with a letter calling her a 'whore' and telling her to 'behave' (an unfortunately frequent
demand of 'troublemaking' women). An explicit video of Ismayilova allegedly recorded by
hidden camera was posted online when she refused to desist. Azerbaijani authorities
are currently detaining Ismailova on vague charges.“The personal is political” – to repeat the
feminist adage. Privacy is both. The idea that 'a man's home is his castle', an early manifestation
of the right to privacy based on preserving (traditionally men's) property rights and protecting
against undue scrutiny has been used to deny women safety from domestic abuse in their own
homes. Women can and should reclaim the 'right to privacy' to guard against unwanted
intrusion into their lives to give them ultimate control over their information, bodies, and lives.
Surveillance technologies are impersonal in the way they operate but surveillance can be
conducted against women to specifically target them as such, whether by an angry lover or an
angrier state. Physical and digital surveillance and harassment of women thrives because
monitoring others' daily lives is widely accepted as as a legitimate practice or at least 'not that
bad' – we do voluntarily forklift loads of our data into social media sites – and because of the
overt or implied desire to control women or at least view them as auxiliary to men (see: all of
human history).
As privacy advocates, we can at least work on one side of the equation. Happy International
Women's Day – now go call your mother

Feminist science fiction makes us reflect on the history of science and its
impacts on women
Donawerth, 1990 (Jane Donawerth, Professor at the University of Maryland, serves as
Director of Writing Programs, has had multiple books published, “Utopian Science:
Contemporary Feminist Science Theory and Science Fiction,” pp. 537-539, 1990, PDF from
JSTOR, Accessed: 7/11/15 RH)

The concern for increased participation by women in science has an analogous utopian
reflection in science fiction by women. A crucial difference between the science depicted in
men's science fiction and women's science fiction is, quite simply, the participation of women. In
Metamorphoses of Science Fiction, Darko Suvin has rightfully pointed out the lack of women
scientists in American science fiction (but failed to add that he had read almost exclusively
science fiction by men). Since at least the early 1960s, women writers have regularly
characterized women as scientists; examples include Mary, biologist and specialist in alien
communication in Naomi Mitchison's Memoirs of a Spacewoman (1962); the biologist Takver
and the physicist Mitis in Ursula K. Le Guin's The Dispossessed (1974); Kira, biologist, M.D., and
"the de facto head of her department at the university" in Pamela Sargent's Cloned Lives (1972-
76); Margaret, the black computer expert in Up the Walls of the World (1978) by James Tiptree,
Jr. (Alice Sheldon); Varian, vet- erinary xenobiologist and co-leader of the expedition in Anne
Mc- Caffrey's Dinosaur Planet Survivors (1984); and Jeanne Velory, black physicist and astronaut
in Vonda McIntyre's Barbary (1986). Even the earliest woman writer for the pulp magazines,
Clare Winger Harris, in a 1928 short story, includes a woman scientist: Hildreth, chemist and
astronomer, assistant to her father in his home laboratory and soon to be assistant to her new
husband. This interest of women science fiction writers in women scientists seems not only a
result of changes in women's careers in the 1960s but also of the struggle to educate women in
the sciences in the late nineteenth century.4 Women scientists as characters in women's science
fiction, moreover, seem a legacy of the earlier feminist utopias. In Mary Bradley Lane's Mizora
(1880-81), for example, chemists and mechanical engineers make the all-woman society a
technological utopia. And in Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland (1915), female geneticists have
bred crop-producing and disease-resistant trees, as well as quiet cats that do not kill birds, while
other women have developed sciences unknown to Gilman's con- temporaries-language as a
science, sanitation, nutrition, and a kind of psychology-history. The feminist utopias, as well as
contemporary wom-en's science fiction, make us see a history of women in science, not just a
few great women who seem to be historical anomalies. In one of the earliest feminist utopias,
ThreeHundred YearsHence (1836), written when most women were still denied college
educations, Mary Griffith shows a future historian relating a woman's invention of a new power
that replaces steam, as well as restoring proper credit to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, "for
introducing into England the practice of inoculation for the small-pox." Such a vision of restoring
women to the history of science is shared by Naomi Mitchison in Memoirs of a Spacewoman;her
hero Mary reflects: I may be out of date, but I always feel that biology and, of course,
communication are essentially women's work, and glory. Yes, I know there have been physicists
like Yin Ih and molecular astronomers-I remember old Jane Rakadsalismyself, her wonderful
black, ageless face opening into a great smile! But somehow the disciplines of life seem more
congenial to most of us women.5 In 1962, when many colleges were still effectually segregated
by race and want ads were still separated by gender into male and female occupations,
Mitchison presents, as a matter of course, the participation of women of color in science. What
these utopian and science fiction writers offer, more importantly than portraits of individual
women scientists, is a revision of past and future science history that includes women as rightful
participants. In this way, they share a goal with feminist historians of science.
 Method
A feminist reading of the handmaidens tale to curtail the surveillance of the female body –
feminist discussions k2 break silence
 Surveillance
Male gaze type shtuff
 Offense against k’s
Ya know perms and shtuff

Women are always pushed to the back and silenced – they are a recreation of this
 FW
Public sphere as masculine probs bad

f/w is surveillance of the female body

Storytelling
 1ac Outline
Handmaidens tale discipline of the body***

Interpellation

Self discipline + interpellation of the feminist body

Method of writing HMT

Method of storytelling general

Advocacy – a queer feminist reading to challenge the boundaries of intersectional anti-queer

violence
 Cards 2 cut
Specific role of the reader-

Different interpretation of the oppression of the handmaids-

Quotes-

Connection cards-
 Cards cut
Offred’s narration as an act of resistance + the role of the reader
writing are acts of resistance – the bodies of the oppressed are disciplined to be silent. Writing
in the world of the Handmaidens is reserved to those in powers because only they are allowed
to But writing allows for personal expression – Offreds storytelling is unique in that it breaks the
silence of the oppressed. Offred inhabits the room of a handmaiden who came before her and
left her own writing on the walls of te cell. Her writing motivated offredd to begin her own. In
this way writing and storytelling are ways of a3akening resistance to systems of domination.
Offred invents a story for the handmaiden beofr3 her and in doing so breaks her own silence
and begins to reclaim her own body. The handmaidens tale is as a whole the writing left on the
wall for us. Our reading is a way of opeining a room for imagination and theorizing of the
experiences of female body.

Gerhard, 2012 (Julia. CONTROL AND RESISTANCE IN THE DYSTOPIAN NOVEL: A COMPARATIVE
ANALYSIS. Thesis. California State University, Chico, 2012. <http://csuchico-
dspace.calstate.edu/bitstream/handle/10211.4/434/4%2018%202012%20Julia%20Gerhard.pdf?
sequence=1>. 66-71 ZJN)
Before I discuss how writing in all three of these novels serves as the means for the main protagonists to find their inner selves,
recognize themselves as individuals, and thus resist the authority of the state, it needs to be noted that writing
by itself
manifests an act of resistance. Since in a dystopian world individuality is suppressed by ideology
and discipline, and people’s actions and thoughts are constantly policed, writing presents a
serious threat to the state: it renders personal expression, self-reflection, and authority—things
that empower people and prompt them to think critically. Not only does writing invite a foreign thought that
can question and challenge the authority of the State, it also enables that foreign thought to move and spread,
posing a tremendous danger for the government’s stability. Therefore, writing is banned in most dystopian
novels and is considered a crime. Hence, people who decide to take such a risk and engage themselves in some form of writing
already break the law and jeopardize their status as a citizen. The mere act of writing violates the state’s law and thus, in itself,
presents an act of resistance. From the first couple pages of Orwell’s 1984, the reader learns that writing is a serious felony in
Oceania and if “detected it was reasonably certain that it would be punished by death” (Orwell 9). As he begins his diary, Smith
admits that “to mark the paper was the decisive act” and, knowing that it was punishable by death, he realizes that the only thing he
needs is “courage,” as “the actual writing would be easy” (10). If writing by itself incorporates crime, then the content of the writing
does not even matter. As Winston later contends after he writes his brazen “DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER” in his diary, “the writing of
those particular words was not more dangerous than the initial 67 act of opening the diary” (19). Keeping a diary equals
thoughtcrime, “the essential crime that contained all others in itself,” and in consequence crystallizes Winston’s daring act of
opposition to the tyrannical rule of Ingsoc and ideology of the Party (19). Winston’s finding of the corner in his apartment that allows
him to hide from the Panopticon gaze of the telescreen and write his diary symbolizes his attempt to find a way to defy and go
against Party’s dominant regime. As Tyner notes, “the simple act of purchasing and possession of a diary constitutes a punishable
offence and thus may be read as an act of resistance” (144). He, however, contends that Winston’s diary, which is “written within
the spaces of the novel,” reveals a more significant meaning of resistance, because despite the Party’s surveillance, as Smith shows,
diaries do get written—so little acts of revolt are possible in dystopian society. In Atwood’s novel, writing and reading is also banned.
In this dystopian society, women according to their new social functions do not need to read or write since their only purpose is to
produce future generations. Reducing handmaids’ human status to almost zero and denying them any power, even the power over
their own bodies, Gilead also prohibits any forms of reading and writing that might offer these women any kind of agency or remind
them of their other “abilities.” Thus, Offred’s narration embodies a great act of resistance, which by its sheer existence constitutes
opposition and reluctance to accept Gilead’s new ideology. Since language is erased and words on signs are substituted by pictures,
Offred’s story telling where she reconstructs the language definitely can be viewed as a brave act of
resistance. If Winston Smith in 1984 uses an archaic instrument, a pen, and buys an old book to be used as his diary, Offred
cannot even do that: women are completely divorced from any written documents and have no access to books, pens or paper.
Unlike Smith and D-503, Offred does not write her story; instead, she narrates her “tale” to the tape-
recorder, which is later discovered by future generations. The reason is obvious—writing is
illegal and Offred cannot have paper or pens in her possession: “It’s also a story I’m telling, in my
head, as I go along. Tell, rather than write, because I have nothing to write with and writing is in
any case forbidden” (52). When Offred goes to the market, she observes how paintings eradicated words that were
previously written on the wooden signs of the shops and could still be seen through the paint when “they decided that even the
names of shops were too much temptation” for women (33). Women in Gilead ought not to be tempted by anything except for
fulfilling their duty of bearing children. Later on, Offred confesses that books belong to the black market now and are nowhere to be
found except in the possession of Commanders and the ruling elite. When the Commander invites her to his room, Offred notices
that around the walls there were many bookcases filed with books. She concludes: “Books and books and books, right out in plain
view, no locks, no boxes. No wonder we can’t come in here. It’s an oasis of the forbidden” (177). Thus, if
Commander holds
power, books in his possession also symbolize a power that is not attainable by Handmaids . In a
way, Offred’s narration becomes her book and symbolizes the power she was able to acquire by
composing it. Later on, while playing Scrabble with the Commander, Offred experiences an inconceivable
feeling of freedom that overpowers her, as she continues to hold possession of words that she
composes and acknowledges—she feels as if “he’s offered her drugs” ( 179). In a different scene, when
Commander gives Offred a Vogue magazine, she is shocked to see something that was supposed to have been burnt. She admits
that 69 she wanted it badly “with a force that made the ends of her fingers ache” (200). She further explains: What was in them
[magazines] was promise. They dealt in transformations; they suggested an endless series of possibilities . . .. They suggested one
adventure after another . . .. They suggested rejuvenation, pain overcome and transcended, endless love. (201) In this sense,
magazines represent feelings and thoughts Handmaids are not supposed to have, something humane and spontaneous. Lastly, the
sentence written on the closet wall by the previous Handmaid in Offred’s room—Nolite te bastardes carborundorum— intrigues and
puzzles her because she cannot understand what it means. Offred, however, is constantly communicating with and thinking about
the Handmaid that occupied her room prior to her coming here and admits that it gives her joy to know that her writing, which she
cannot even decipher, was at least read by one other person. She knows it contains an important message, but cannot interpret it.
She ponders: “Why did she write this, why did she bother?” (190). This sentence becomes emblematic in a sense that if it cannot be
decoded, it means that the power lies in the writing itself—in the unknown message it was trying to articulate. It can be argued that
Offred’s narration was inspired by it and becomes the embodiment of the message of this unknown woman, who represents
women in general, oppressed and silenced, who were trying to speak, but could not be heard.
Thus, now it is Offred’s duty to continue the message, to let it reach the unknown audience: You
don’t tell a story only to yourself. There’s always someone else. Even when there is no one. A
story is like a letter. Dear You, I’ll say. Just you, without a name . . .. You can mean more than
one. You can mean thousands . . . I’ll pretend you can hear me . (53) 70 By composing and
recording her story in a society where reading, writing or speaking is prohibited, Offred
represents the voice of the oppressed, and the act of her narration defies the rules of the
domineering regime. As Linda Kauffman points out, in The Handmaid’s Tale, “the medium changes, but the mode remains
the same” (222)—Offred challenges the system by speaking up against it through stealing the
language and spreading the message of the silenced victims, thus making the act of her
narrating a rebellion in itself: “Exiled, imprisoned, cloistered, or ‘shut up,’ epistolary heroines
are deeply subversive because for them writing [or narrating] itself is an act of revolt ” (226). Unlike
1984 and The Handmaid’s Tale, writing is not banned in Zamyatin’s We, but it has a limited function. The purpose of art and poetry is
purely panegyrical in Zamyatin’s dystopia; it has to eulogize the grandeur and mathematically rational life of One State as well as the
infallibility of the Benefector, evident in the poems like “Mathematical Rhymes,” “Daily Odes to the Benefector,” “Late for Work,”
“Flowers of Judicial Verdicts.” As T.R.N. Edwards claims in his book Three Russian Writers and the Irrational: Zamyatin, Pil`nyak, and
Bulgakov, art and writing are “subordinated to the purpose of propaganda, and serves a utilitarian aim” (69). Indeed, D-503 himself
divulges that “poetry today is not some impudent nightingale’s piping—poetry is government service, poetry is usefulness”
(Zamyatin 67). He finds it repulsive that poets in the past “wrote about whatever popped into their heads,” but ends up doing it
himself since the medium he chooses for his writing suggests self-reflection and self-questioning rather than simple praise (66). As
Edwards puts it, “what is intended to be a civic bequest to the inhabitants of other planets soon turns into an intimate record of D-’s
love affair with Iand his growing awareness” of his self (63). What is interesting is that D-503 is aware of 71 his digression into his
emotional world and his deviation from the original plan to praise and record the infallible perfect life of OneState, and yet he
continues to do it. As he mentions himself, he wants to fit “any absurdity” of his narration into “a syllogism,” but obviously fails to
accomplish it, as he regretfully affirms: I am crushed to see that instead of the elegant and strict mathematical poem in honor of
OneState, it’s turning out to be some kind of fantastic adventure novel. Oh, if only this really were just a novel instead of my actual
life, filled with X’s, √ 1, and degradations. (99) Thus, his continuation to record his feelings instead of composing a paean clearly
shows his resistance to the rules of OneState since, as he himself states, art is not supposed to be personal, but only utilitarian. He
ignores his duty as an orthodox dystopian citizen to pay tribute to the State and its values, and thus subverts the ideology by his
writing: “Yes, duties, . . . in my mind I quickly went through the most recent entries in these pages. The fact that there wasn’t
anywhere the least thought of any duty . . . ” (127). D’s heretical diary not only reveals the irregularities of OneState’s life, but also
challenges State’s collective ideology through his newly discovered individuality: Picture this: a human finger, cut off from its body,
its hand . . . a separate human finger, running hopping alone, all hunched over, on a glass sidewalk. I am that finger. And what is
strangest of all, most unnatural of all, is that the finger hasn’t got the slightest desire to be on the hand, to be with the others . . ..
(100)

Reclaiming The body through writing

- Theorizing the female body through writing allows for offred to reclaim her body from
the state and make it once more her own. She is able to recreate an identity of her own.
Writing can reconstruct the womans body. It opposes the discipline put upon women.
The reading of the story simialarly acts as breaking the silence that fenmale bodies are
disciplined to have about the way that their body is interprellated in society and claimed
as public property.

Gerhard, 2012 (Julia. CONTROL AND RESISTANCE IN THE DYSTOPIAN NOVEL: A COMPARATIVE
ANALYSIS. Thesis. California State University, Chico, 2012. <http://csuchico-
dspace.calstate.edu/bitstream/handle/10211.4/434/4%2018%202012%20Julia%20Gerhard.pdf?
sequence=1>. 33-37 ZJN)

Writing or, to be exact, narrating in Margaret Atwood’s dystopia The Handmaid’s Tale also plays a central
role as the main protagonist’s way of resistance to the theocratic regime of the Republic of
Gilead, where women are exclusively valued for their reproductive function and are mentally
and physically abused by the patriarchal ruling class . While, in Zamyatin’s and Orwell’s dystopias, writing helps the main characters to
discover their individuality and reconnect with the past, in Atwood’s futuristic world, Offred, the main heroine, employs writing to

reconstruct her body, which has been disciplined and exploited for the state’s benefit. As Foucault puts
it, the discipline that the state employs to achieve its supremacy has to dominate and control the

body to achieve its total subjection: “the discipline increases the forces of the body (in economic terms of utility) and diminishes these same forces
(in political terms of obedience)” (138). Thus, she has to regain her body and reclaim her authority, recreate her

identity and challenge the state’s ideals by narrating her story . Among the dystopian novels discussed in this chapter,
Atwood’s novel literally belongs to the tradition of écriture féminine and directly reflects the philosophies of the feminist writers on the role of women and their oppression in

women in Gilead are defined only through their social functions of procreation, are
society. Since

treated as “fertility machines,” and have no power over the autonomy of their own bodies, the
only way to survive and resist the repression is to attempt to regain their bodies (Freibert 282). Writing,
subsequently, becomes the avenue for the reconstruction and liberation of the woman’s body,
which has been taken away from her, rendering her voiceless and powerless . As Cixous underlines in her essay
“The Laugh of the Medusa,” writing enables woman to “return to the body which has been more than

confiscated from her, which has been turned into the uncanny stranger on display” (395). Since
the woman “is reduced to being the servant of the militant male, his shadow,” she has to rebel
and let her body be heard through writing,— “an act which will not only ‘realize’ the decensored
relation of woman to her sexuality, to her womanly being,” but also “give her back her goods, her pleasures,
her organs, her immense bodily territories which have been kept under seal.” Narrating her own story thus
becomes essential for Offred, because through writing she recreates her body, reconstructs her identity, and remains human. As I discussed in the previous chapter,

Offred, the main protagonist in The Handmaid’s Tale, always refers to her body as something
over which she does not have control anymore, something that is foreign or distant from her,
something that is needed by the governing elite and thus treated as their property. In the Republic of
Gilead, where as a result of the military coup, religious fundamentalists obtain governmental power, women who can still reproduce become a “national resource,” as nuclear
pollution has rendered most women infertile (Atwood 85). Her role now is to give birth, and, if she is unable to accomplish it, she will be labeled an “unwoman” and sent to the
Colonies to toil laboriously until she dies. Aunts indoctrinate Handmaids to think of themselves as “seeds,” but Offred refuses to be considered just a seed: she feels that as a
human being she is entitled to have the 93 ownership over her own body and her self (25). Thus, since she is denied the ownership of her body, she must reclaim it through her
story. As Sheila Conboy assures in her article “Scripted, Conscripted, and Circumcised,” Offred “refigures” her lost body “through the text, as she imagines the narrative as a
metaphorical body” (356). The leitmotif of the dismembered body is vividly present in this novel and becomes the metaphor for Offred’s lost body to the ruthless values of
Gilead, one she must reconstruct through her story. Images of and references to body parts can be detected throughout the whole novel (Rubenstein 104). In this dystopia,
handmaids are only viewed as “two legged wombs” (176); the doctor who examines Offred “deals with a torso only” (78); the image of hands reoccurs multiple times when
Offred thinks how “empty” they seem to her, as they “could be held, but not seen” (Atwood 62; Rubenstein 104). When Offred has memories of her husband, Luke, she
confesses that she feels like a “missing person” and expresses the incredible urge to hold a human body: Can I be blamed for wanting a real body, to put my arms around?
Without it I too am disembodied. I can listen to my own heartbeat against the bedsprings, I can stroke myself, under the dry white sheets, in the dark, but I too am dry and
white, hard, granular; it’s like running my hand over a plateful of dried rice; it’s like snow. There’s something dead about it, something deserted. (132) When women all of a
sudden become powerless over night as a result of the military coup that establishes the rule of the Judeo-Christian theocracy in Gilead, Offred recalls that she thought as if
somebody had “cut off [her] feet” (Atwood 232; Rubenstein 105). Interestingly enough, Offred’s friend Moira, the one who tries to escape from the Aunts’ controlling discipline
and indoctrination, is punished mercilessly, and it is her feet that are tortured “with steel cables, frayed at the ends” since, as Aunt Lydia puts it, “for our purposes your feet and

the propaganda 94 movies that Aunts show to the Handmaids,

your hands are not essential” (118). Finally,

underscoring how women have been mistreated in the past, contain dead and mutilated bodies
and once even show a woman “being slowly cut into pieces, her fingers and breasts snipped off
with garden shears, her stomach slit open and her intestines pulled out” (152). All these images of
the dismembering woman’s body symbolize and highlight Offred’s and other women’s loss of
any authority over their bodies and become the metaphors of their shattered selves. Thus, Offred must
revive her mutilated body through her narration, in which she recreates her identity, gains agency, and puts together the pieces of her dismembered body. This symbolism of
disembodiment is analyzed by Roberta Rubenstein, who asserts that Offred’s text becomes “an act of self-generation that opposes the oppressive obligations of procreation”
and also functions as Offred’s struggle “to reconstruct her fragmented selfhood and to justify the choices she has made” (105). Conboy also discusses this theme in her article
and states that Offred’s “textual body, ‘this sad and hungry and sordid, this limpid and mutilating story,’ replicates the narrator’s literal body, which is cut off from her free mind:

Offred’s story serves as

both body and text are experienced as parts which do not always cohere, as shattered wholes” (Atwood 267-268; Conboy 356). Thus,

means to glue the pieces of her dismembered body and her shattered self together. Another critic, Debrah
Raschke, examines this idea as well in her work “Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale: False Borders and Subtle Subversions” and illustrates how Handmaids’ names
resonate with their distorted bodies and selves. She explains that the newly created class of Handmaids is distinguished not only by their redcolored dresses and white wings of
their hats, but also by their new names, which are “formed by a preposition and its object”—Offred—meaning of Fred, Fred’s possession 95 that “mark them not only as claimed
property, but as nonsubjects” (259). She rightly suggests: “Through the exclusive use of the preposition and its object, the ‘I’ and the connecting verb in this syntactical
construction become eliminated entirely. By saying ‘Of Fred’ instead of ‘I am of Fred,’ the subject (of the sentence) is effaced, thus diminishing the chances of a Handmaid

etaphorically, the Handmaids, unable

constructing herself as an ‘I’ (as a subject or a self). Total erasure” (259). Therefore, she concludes that “m

to tell their own stories, are ‘blank pages,’ untold stories—women’s histories, cultures, and
writing that have been edited out of the dominant culture or reformulated to fit the masculine
mode” (259). Because their selves are taken from them and even their names are changed and mutilated, they are voiceless and powerless, and thus now must reclaim
their authority and narrate their own story, where they can recreate their identity, the one that has been “edited out” to fit the dominant culture. Another way that writing or
authorship functions in this novel is it provides the main protagonist with a space of her own since she literally does not exist in this dystopian society as a person—only as a
child-bearing machine—or, as Raschke puts it, “a baby maker, procreator, womb vessel” (259). Consequently, writing grants Offred an opportunity to express and repossess her
self as a human being, and explore her identity as a person—not simply an “ambulatory chalice” (176). The idea of a body being a woman’s “dwelling place” is introduced and
explored by a feminist writer Nancy Mairs in her essay “Reading Houses, Writing Lives: The French Connection,” where she claims that woman by embracing her body will find
her own private space in society. Mirroring Cixous’ idea of the body, Mairs affirms: 96 Still forced to function as man’s Other and thus, alienated from her self, she has not been
able to live in her ‘own’ house, her very body . . . Women haven’t had eyes for themselves. They haven’t gone exploring in their house . . . Their bodies, which they haven’t dared
enjoy, have been colonized. (412) Hence, she determines that writing becomes woman’s living space, and “through writing her body, a woman may reclaim the deed to her
dwelling” (412). The erasure of women—which Raschke and Mysriades talk about—and thus their “inexistence” with no space of their own is evident in Gilead from not only the
way women are treated by the government and Commanders, but also by the way they live. After the military upheaval, women are stripped off their jobs and bank accounts,
their old clothes and names, their right to love and be with who they want, even the right to read and be educated, and thus, as Ginette Katz-Roy puts it, “they became
anonymous workers in a society organized like a gigantic bee-hive or ant-hill” (119). Their invisibility is also underscored by their new dress code: a long red dress that hides the
figure, red gloves and shoes—everything is red—“the color of blood, which defines them”; the only thing that is white is the hat that has wings on the sides, “which keep them
from seeing, but also from being seen” (Atwood 11). As Aunt Lydia preaches to them, “to be seen is to be penetrated. What you must be girls is impenetrable” (38). Offred
resides in a small room with no windows or mirrors at the Commander’s house, which is a compound with gates all around for protection, like a “prison” (Katz-Roy 119). Offred
admits: “Now and again we vary the route; there is nothing against it, as long as we stay within barriers. A rat in a maze is free to go anywhere, as long as it stays within the
maze” (53). The old gymnasium where the Handmaids undergo their “education” is always surveilled by the Aunts; they are constantly in view and have no privacy, or, as
Virginia Woolf puts it, no “room” of their 97 own. Once Offred is assigned to the Commander and comes to live with him and his wife, she refuses to call the room “hers” as if
she knows that once she acknowledges it, she accepts the rules of this game and succumbs to the regime’s power. Thus, Offred finds that room of her own through writing or to
be exact narrating (since writing is not allowed there, she narrates her tale on the tape-recorder), enabling her to become visible, gain self-autonomy and become human again.
Since she is completely voiceless and powerless in this society, she claims her voice and her body back by composing her story. As Coral Ann Howells points out in her book

Offred refuses to be silenced, as she speaks out with the voice of late twentieth-
Margaret Atwood, “

century feminist individualism, resisting the cultural identity imposed on her” (99). Linda Myrsiades also justly
proposes that Offred, “deprived of the ‘room’ that was her own, . . . must create a space she can claim as hers, a storied place that allows her to possess her whole self” (230).

Offred’s composition “yields her an emergent ‘place’ of her own,” as she “owns both
Thus,

intellectual and property rights over that which she composes” (234). Offred claims power over
her own body, the one that has been, as Foucault puts it, “manipulated, shaped, trained” by the state,
and her composing becomes something that she can control: “I would like to believe this is a
story I’m telling. I need to believe it . . .. If it’s a story I’m telling, then I have control over the
ending. Then there will be an ending, to the story, and real life will come after it” (Foucault 136; Atwood 52).
Offred’s authorship becomes a very empowering and emancipating means to regain her body and identity as she recomposes and reconstructs her story. Since writing enables
one to invent one’s language to resist the repression from the domineering culture, and, as Althusser maintains, break through the “ruling ideology,” it allows one to 98 also
recreate and even change the reality because reality is expressed and perceived through language (139). Cixous comments on women’s writing and the new language they have
to embrace: “Women must write through their bodies, they must invent the impregnable language that will wreck partitions, classes and rhetorics, regulations and codes, they
must submerge, cut through, get beyond the ultimate reserve-discourse” (399). Offred certainly gains agency through language that she recreates with her narration, since
writing and reading is banned in Gilead: even public signs are replaced by symbols and pictures: Loaves and Fishes is fishmonger’s—“a wooden sign” with “a fish with a smile and
eyelashes” (Atwood 212), All Flesh—a pictorial representation for the butcher’s shop, Milk and Honey—a wooden sign with “three eggs, a bee and a cow” (Katz-Roy 126;

Atwood 34). Thus, Offred’s text symbolizes the rebellion against the erasure of the language and
women’s deprivation of literacy and education. Obviously, language means power, but unlike its manipulation in
1984, in Gilead, language is completely ignored and forgotten—women are forbidden to read even

the signs at the supermarket. Thus, as Katz-Roy contends, Offred’s narration becomes “a confessional sort of writing or story-telling which rehabilitates
the female body as the origin of an alternative type of discourse” (128). In her narration, Offred does not only reflect on her past

and her feelings, but also defines and re-defines a lot of words and meanings, thus, holding the
language in her power and gaining authority. As Cixous emphasizes, feminine type of writing is highly stylized, “never simple or linear”
because the feminine writer “doesn’t deny her drives”—“she lays herself bare” (396). What Cixous advocates is a practice of writing that by “sweeping away syntax” (399)
“becomes utterly destructive,” “volcanic,” capable 99 of cutting through and subverting the official discourse (401). Consequently, she concludes that this “new insurgent
writing” (395) grants one freedom from the repression of the domineering ideology: . . . it will always surpass the discourse that regulates the phallocentric system; it does and
will take place in areas other than those subordinated to philosophicotheoretical domination. It will be conceived of only by subjects who are breakers of automatisms, by
peripheral figures that no authority can ever subjugate. (397) If we look at Offred’s writing, it becomes apparent that it does fall into the category of the “new insurgent writing”
that Cixous is promoting. Offred narrates in a circular manner often offering plurality of meanings to many words, sometimes even contradicting and doubting herself. For
example, this is how she defines the word “chair”: “I sit in the chair and think about the word chair. It can also mean the leader of a meeting. It can also be a mode of execution.
It is the first syllable in charity. It is the French word for flesh; none of these facts has any connection with the others” (Atwood 140). In this handling of multiple various
connotations that she once learnt, Offred obtains power and gains authority through authorship that comes from freedom to experiment with language and break through the
conventional definitions and labels. This power is also provided to her when the Commander suddenly invites her to his study and offers to play Scrabble. She derives an
incredible pleasure in playing the game, and, as Katz-Roy points out, among the words she composes are “larynx” and “gorge”—“organs associated with the production of
sounds,” which stand for her desire to speak up and be heard (129). She even finds a word that the Commander does not know, such as “zilch,” which gives her a sense of
empowerment over him. As Conboy maintains, the Scrabble game 100 represents in miniature the narrator’s text: she employs many words which reflect her bodily restrictions
or desires (larynx, zygote, limp…); then she liberates herself as she shapes and tastes the words that she can substitute for those that have been out in her mouth (‘Blessed be
the fruit’. . .). (356) As Offred confesses, “I want to steal something,” she accomplishes it in stealing and recreating the language, and gaining control over her narrative: I would
like to steal something from this room. I would like to take some small thing, the scrolled ashtray, the little silver pillbox from the mantel perhaps . . . hide it in the folds of my

Thus, her narration

dress or in my zippered sleeve . . .. Every once in a while I would take it out and look at it. It would make me feel that I have power. (103)

becomes something she could hide and keep for her own use, something of her own that gives
her power. Another aspect of her composing that resembles the kind of writing Cixous is endorsing is manifested in Offred’s frequent manipulation of her own story:
she provides three different descriptions of her date with Nick, three accounts of Luke’s departure and often doubts her own words and descriptions (Katz-Roy 130). By giving
various options through her narration, Offred offers some sort of freedom of interpretation and outcome that grants her authority and power to control. Therefore, the
language that she creates in her narrative empowers Offred to break through the conventions of Gilead, resist its rules and regulations, and get her body back by recomposing it
through her story. As Conboy asserts: “Offred makes the body her book—one which she both reads and writes in a new mode” (Conboy 355). Indeed, when she narrates her

All in all, being under the

story, she rewrites and reinvents her self: “My self is a thing I must now compose, as one composes a speech” (Atwood 86).

tremendous control and surveillance that the state employs to discipline its people and their
bodies, dystopian citizens seek resistance through writing that grants them authority, new
identity and power. Writing becomes an 101 essential part of survival under oppressive rule, as
it not only allows people to express themselves and find their individuality, but also endows
them with voice and agency that liberates them from the Party’s dogma and grants them self-
autonomy in these suppressive conditions. As Anzaldúa assures, women, or anyone subjugated by the dominant culture or authority,
should “write to record what others erase,” “to become more intimate” and “preserve” oneself because “the act of writing is the act of making soul, . . . the quest for the self”
(319). As a consequence, in a dystopian novel, where the concept of individuality is vanishing—personal life merges with the social, human body and mind are appropriated
according to the communal needs of the state—writing becomes an imperative mode to free oneself from the collective ideology and gain personal independence, discover
one’s true identity and recreate one’s own body and mind. When people’s body and mind are constantly manipulated and exploited, narration or writing becomes a vital agency
that can put the pieces of their mutilated bodies and tortured minds together and offer them a space for recreation, remembering and reconstruction of the self. Whether
writing allows dystopian citizens to see themselves as individuals with their own personal feelings and ambitions (We), or enables them to reconnect with their past and regain
their memories (1984), or permits them to reconstruct their bodies (The Handmaid’s Tale), it grants them a sense of authority and identity and presents them with an
opportunity for revival and rebirth.

The Docile Female Body – Where Resistance Starts

The Handmaid’s Tale – The Female Body as a Site of Resistance

Julia Pei-Hsuan Hsieh

The Handmaid’s Tale – The Female Body as a Site of Resistance

Julia Pei-Hsuan Hsieh

The female body in the handmaidens tale is formed as the object of gaze – interpellated and
possessed by the dominant groups. The society is cannibalistic in the way that it consumes the
female bodies for its own growth. 3

Analysis of food

Offred’s rebellious thinking develops as she receives more and more control on her body , and it
manifests itself first in Offred’s observation of her own body and then through her relating her body to food. With her body being disciplined, she

also has changed her attitude toward her own body. She reflects the big difference between her
concept of body as concrete, substantial and multifunctional in the old time, and the void she
feels within herself after her body becomes docile: I used to think of my body as an instrument,
of pleasure, or a means of transportation, or an implement for the accomplishment of my will. [ ]
There were limits, but my body was nevertheless lithe, single, solid, one with me. 11 Now the flesh arranges itself differently. I’m a

cloud, congealed around a central object, the shape of a pear, which is hard and more real than I
am and glows red within its translucent wrapping . [ ] It transits, pauses, continues on and passes out of sight, and I see despair coming
towards me like famine. To feel that empty, again, again. (74) Here the sense of emptiness is dubious to say the least. In one sense, Offred’s body is a docile one, concerned with

The want of conceiving a baby drives Offred desperate: in a way, she

not having a fetus fill up her empty womb.

needs the baby to survive in the Gilead since she has no chance left after the previous failures in
the other two households. In another, Offred experiences the despair of loss and the dread of
being left empty with nothing once more. To her, this baby is not merely a new life for the
household, but a new life for her. Atwood further illustrates how the female body, extraordinarily, can be torn apart in Gilead society. Through
Offred’s experience of her separated body and her sense of self, she reveals her shameful feeling of looking at her own body: My nakedness is strange to me already. My body
seems outdated. Did I really wear ething suits, at the beach? I did, without thought, among men, without caring that my legs, my arms, my thighs and back were on display,

Shameful, immodest. I avoid looking down at my body, not so much because it’s
could be seen.

shameful or immodest but because I don’t want to see it. I don’t want to look at something that
determines me so completely. (63) Here, her body has become “something,” an “it” that she
does not feel like claiming hers . Likewise, she experiences the separation of her body from herself by
composing her own body as “a thing” (66). Her identifying herself as a cloud that “congealed around a central object, the shape of a pear, which is
hard and more real than [she is] and glows red within its translucent wrapping” somehow may explain both her desire of conceiving a child and her complicated inner transition
of separating her body and her self. That is why she sometimes fails to tell the reality from her dream, because she recollects the dream in which she was with her child, and
then feels desperate and despair about her situation. Sometimes Offred reminisces and expresses her desolation: “Maybe the life I think I’m living is a paranoid delusion” (109).

she becomes devastated owing to the separation of

And sometimes, she hears something inside her body fall apart (146). All in all,

her body and self. With an attempt to keep her identity, this experience of the separation of the
body and the self, however, further enables Offred to realize how her female body is the object
of gaze, the object of desire, and is materialized as objects. Making the female body objectified, the Gilead authority penetrates
their power throughout the nation. And that further drives Offred to the edge so as to cherish her scarce power that she 12 secretly maintains for retaining her identity and her
name from the past. She remembers how she and all of the women in the pre-Gilead society lost their power to the Gilead authority. With her financial accounts frozen and her
job taken away, Offred feels “white, flat, thin” and transparent; back then, she started to question: “Surely they will be able to see through me. Worse, how will I be able to hold
onto Luke, to her [ ]” (85). She feels as if she is made of smoke, and the sense of being penetrated and seen through further deprives her of the calm, confidence and power.

Whatever she does, her body is

Then she later experiences similar nakedness and transparent when she is in the Commander’s study room.

always scrutinized and studied like an object by the Commander. Offred recollects her
uneasiness under his gaze: “While I read, the Commander sits and watches me doing it, without
speaking but also without taking his eyes off me. This watching is a curiously sexual act, and I
feel undressed while he does it” (184). The Commander’s demonstration of his power does not simply take place when he concentrates on Offred’s
body and movement. The night at the Jezebel’s, Offred is completely conscious the Commander uses her to show off. That night when she dresses up to the Jezebel’s with the
Commander, she is aware of her body as a body wearing a purple evening rental tag. Or, there are times Offred perceives how the Commander patronizes her as if she is “an
almost extinct animal” when he looks at her. Nevertheless, there are times that Offred enjoys being watched, for the scarce power that she experiences. When her power is
reduced to almost none, she uses her body as a source of power that further assists her to confirm her subjectivity. She uses her body as a seductive apparatus as she faces the
checkpoint Guards: They touch with their eyes instead and I move my hips a little, feeling the full red skirt sway around me. It’s like thumbing your nose from behind a fence and
teasing a dog with a bone held out of reach, and I’m ashamed of myself for doing it, because none of this is the fault of these men, they’re too young. Then I find I’m not
ashamed after all. I enjoy the power, power of a dog bone, passive but there. (22) And yet it is not merely Offred that is the target of gaze in Gilead. She is conscious that her
body is taken as a freight of hope of others, for she acknowledges other’s expectation on her; she realizes that herself is like “a queen ant with eggs” and “the vehicle” of other’s
hope (135). Through all the images of numerous objects and items, Offred understands very well how much her body and her womb have been objectified, and how much she is
reduced to the basic level of biological function of a female body, and that makes her even more anxious to restore her subjectivity. With her five senses’ becoming keener than
ever, Offred is also more critical in her observation of her body and the food. Here I would like to do a closer inspection on 13 Offred’s resistance through the correlated imagery
of the female body, food and eating in The Handmaids’s Tale. As in The Edible Woman, patriarchal control of women and women’s resistance in The Handmaid’s Tale find a
powerful expression in the comparison of the female body to foods, and the issue of who gets to own or consume these foods. In the epigraph, Atwood quotes from Swift’s The
Modest Proposal. Critics like Karen Stein compares Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale with Jonathan Swift’s The Modest Proposal; this comparison somehow explains that the
images of food, eating and the body, particularly the female body in The Handmaid’s Tale (as well as in The Edible Woman) is closely associated with food such as meat, as Stein
points out, The cannibal theme is carried out in several ways in Tale. On some level, the foods the handmaids eat, symbolic representations of wombs and fertility (pears, eggs,
chickens, bread described as baking in the oven), are analogues for their bodies. Additionally, one of Offred’s flashback memories recounts her childhood fear of cannibalism. [ ]
By means of this digression, Offred makes explicit the analogies between Gilead and Nazi Germany, and between her tale and “A Modest Proposal” (66-7). While trying to
maintain her bodily consciousness, Offred uses smell to make associations with the past, and with the women around her. From Marthas’s kitchen, for instance, she recollects
the smell of her kitchen in the old times, of the days when she was still a mother, still had a mother, and of the food smell. Also, she sympathizes with Marthas owing to their
constraint with endless chores in the kitchen and she is eager to communicate and connect with other women. The imagery of food is scattered in the text: The table has been
scrubbed off, cleared of flour; today’s bread, freshly baked, is cooling on its rack. The kitchen smells of yeast, a nostalgic smell. It reminds me of other kitchens, kitchens that

these imagery
were mine. It smells of mothers; although my own mother did not make bread. It smells of me, in former times, when I was a mother. (47) How does

of foods arouse her self-awareness and provoke her the want of self-preservation ? Offred regards this
kitchen full of smell of food a past memory and a warning as “a treacherous smell” that she should keep away from. Nonetheless, she reveals her longing of her old identity as a
mother and a daughter. Furthermore, her keen senses dwelling on the memory of being a mother and a daughter lead her to explore the smell that she notices in the sitting
room and with Serena Joy. Offred has complicated feelings toward Serena Joy, who may be her surrogate mother, that ought to look after her in the household. Truth is, Serena
does not actually care for Offred as a daughter. On the first day of Offred’s arrivel, Serena makes Offred understand her stance of the lady in the household, stressing on the
unchangeable relationship with 14 her husband, and her principle of seeing Offred as least as possible. Her cold attitude and sexless smells along with the tasteless collections in
the sitting room, in a way, have frustrated Offred and reminded her of the past when she was still a mother and still had a mother. Offred’s frustration in failing to connect with
Serena, therefore, has hardened her loneliness in the spatial constraint, and yet made her determined to move beyond her spatial limit. Through Offred’s narration, in Gilead

.
society, women’s bodies are very often compared to food. Hence, the food connected with the female body further reinforces the fact that the female body is materialized

Not only is the female body conditioned and kept in fixed positions in society, but women’s diet
is strictly controlled. Women’s pregnant bodies collage with images of foods such as pears, eggs,
oranges and lunch. Offred herself treats her body as food : she sways her body like a dog-bone to seduce the Guards and the
Angels as if they are dogs longing for food. Similarly, she compares herself as “a ripe melon” when she uses her body to imagine manipulating man: Did the sight of my ankle
make him lightheaded, faint, at the checkpoint yesterday, when I dropped my pass and let him pick it up for me? No handkerchief, no fan, I use what’s handy. Winter is not so
dangerous. I need hardness, cold, rigidity; not this heaviness, as if I’m a melon on a stem, this liquid ripeness. (154) On the Birthday, Ofwarren, whose real name is Janine,
requests for extra sugar and is instructed that too much sugar is not good for her body. Likewise, from time to time, Offred feels tempted whenever she sees Nick and the Wife
smoking. And when she is offered one cigarette from the Wife, she is warned not to have too much of it. Furthermore, food in Gilead does not simply mean the food that people
eat, it can also be an indication to social status. That is why when Offred brings home a bony chicken, Martha Rita complains about it, for she thinks the Commander’s rank
should make Offred be brave enough to speak up and get a better one (48). Later on the Birth day, Offred also notices that at the Ofwarren’s household, there are oranges which
may stand for the higher status of the whole household. In short, the abundant images of food in The Handmaid’s Tale first indicate how the female body can be controlled by
the regulation of diet and hence correlated with Atwood’s concern of social cannibalism. Like the food bearing something meaningful more than its substantial function, the
body appears in a form of a collage of food. That is, the body is compared to food and collaborated with the image of food. Like The Edible Woman, Atwood connects the female
body with the food in The Handmaids’s Tale and strengthens her observation of the analogy between the two. Women’s bodies of the past are compared to meat by the Aunts
so as to stress on the inappropriate exterior decoration: 15 The spectacles women used to make of themselves. Oiling themselves like roast meat on a spit, and bare backs and
shoulders, on the street, in public, and legs, not even stockings on them, no wonder those things used to happen. [ ] Such things do not happen to nice women. And not good for
the complexion, not at all, wrinkle you up like a dried apple. (55) For the Aunts, dressing with exposure of the female body is improper and justifiable reason for rape to take
place on women. In a way, remarks on the female body in the past for Aunt Lydia and Offred’s Commander are like meat. While the Commander and the Aunts comparing the
female body to food, Offred feels that the female body in Gilead is food, or is treated as if it were food. Here and there, I see Offred relate the female body to food. At the
doctor’s office, she is aware of the doctor’s calling her “honey,” which is a generic terms that Offred thinks it could represent all women. Among Marthas’ talk, she feels
uncomfortable when Rita is tenderizing the chicken and asks Cora to bathe Offred at the same time. The chicken reminds Offred of Handmaid’s body and Aunts’ teaching on the
importance of healthy food and Handmaid’s body: “The thigh of a chicken, overcooked. It’s better than bloody, which is the other way she does it. [ ] You have to get your
vitamins and minerals, said Aunt Lydia coyly. You must be a worthy vessel” (65). And later that night, though Offred feels repulsive, she does not dare throw up so she “chewed
and swallowed, chewed and swallowed” until she feels the sweat come out (65-66). Yet she does save some butter and hide it secretly for herself to use later at night. The Aunts
have been instructing the Handmaids that they are containers, only the interior body parts are important (96), in that case, Handmaids are not to tend to the appearance of the
female body. As in other novels by Atwood, the image of egg and the female body is connected, so can this be proved in The Handmaid’s Tale. Imaginative as Offred is, when
eating, she imagines the egg being “what God must look like,” and she remembers, “Women used to carry such eggs between their breasts, to incubate them” (110); old
memory of the past like this makes her pleased and desire for one. Here, the egg becomes a metaphor and a pun in Offred’s narration which reveals her crave and nostalgia.
Food as it is, the egg later becomes a suggestion to Offred of how much a pregnant woman could be operated on like the food people eat with the knifes and spoons. That is, the
image of Janine’s pregnant body as the food that is cut open by doctor’s knife and brought up when she eats up her food and the teaching she receives: Once they drugged
women, induced labor, cut them open, sewed them up. No more. No anesthetics, even. Aunt Elizabeth said it was better for the baby, but also: I will greatly multiply thy sorrow
and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children. At lunch we got that, brown bread and lettuce sandwiches. (114) 16 For Offred, she uses butter to maintain her
body. This gesture of connecting food with her body, which she compares to food from time to time, indicates how the female body is treated like edible in Gilead. As she recalls
that her body is supposed to be a useful one that produces babies, she also remembers, when she was young she had mistaken her mother’s story about the Jews in the old
time: she thought the Jews were cooked in the oven like food. Furthermore, she later compares the conceivable female body to an oven with bun and a chalice with wine.
Hence, words, the food she eats and the female body she sees have all become one in a very restricted circumstance under Gileadean surveillance, and that somehow has

Once the female body is regarded useful and

colluded to the Commander and the Aunt’s remarks on the female body which is like meat.

edible like food, it is hard for Offred to maintain her identity intact since her body becomes
consumable in the cannibalistic Gilead society. After the Salvaging ceremony, death triggers
Offred’s appetite. This implication, in one way, consolidates Atwood’s picture of a cannibalistic
society, and in another way, empowers her protagonist to transform her bodily resistance to
thinking and to the use of language.
The Writing Self in an Active Female Body – A Site of Resistance and
Construction for Subjectivity
The Handmaid’s Tale – The Female Body as a Site of Resistance

Julia Pei-Hsuan Hsieh

AT FW

-Offred rewrites the past fo the female body thus reclaiming it. Control is omni[present oin
gilead society – but her capabiulity to use language grants offred power. The aunts siulenmce
unwanted speech

Besides keeping her bodily consciousness as a way of preserving her identity, Offred actively
resists the overall control by criticizing the present and revising her past. In a way, beneath her
apparent passivity, she has been reflecting, revising, criticizing and reconstructing her past as
well as her present more and more actively. And in this aspect, she has been a story-teller in her
mind, a composer of her body, even before she disappears from Gilead and tells her story into
the tapes. The written body thus gets merged into the writing subject, and it all starts with
Offred’s sensitivity to and revision of Gilead’s language’s control. To maintain her subjectivity
and to rediscover her power, Offred tells the story, reconstructs her story, rephrases what she
has learned and heard, and shows her power in narrating what has happened in Gilead. She
rebuilds her subjectivity through her strong senses. Keen sensitivity helps her sharpen her
imagination and observation that are important to narration, and also helps remind her of the
past and preserve her real name. Only by sticking to refreshing her memory of her identity and
life in pre-Gilead society can Offred reconstruct her subjectivity and reaffirm her existence as an
individual. By investigating how Offred uses her narration as well as her body to resist Gilead’s
severe control, I intend to show the way she gradually discovers her power through language,
imagination, memory and, most importantly, her bodily actions. 17 Control is everywhere in
Gilead, just as Offred’s subtle revision of its verbal control. Offred’s hiding of her real name and
revision of her given name, first of all, shows her resistance. “Offred,” an indication of
patronymic ownership—of Fred—is turned in her mind into “off red,” or evading the
Handmaid’s sign of red color. Also, Offred’s sensitivity of verbal constraint makes her notice that
the stocks of biblical phrases and teachings that all the Handmaids are forced to bear in mind
contain a great deal of ironies. For instance, the literal biblical dialogue of Leah connects giving
birth with death. She uses puns to interpret the words she hears with different meanings such
as the word “Mayday,” as M’aidez, a French distress call, and “date rape” as a French dessert
name. Mario Klarer regards Offred’s narration and searching for different meanings of words as
a process that “is not only the key to gaining access to the past, but also provides the possibility
of anticipating the future, or that which does not yet exist” (134). That is to say, in the language-
forbidden nation where words are reduced and simplified as wooden signs and biblical scrolls,
language assists her to retain her subjectivity and struggle for a possible future. Though her
body is a docile one, her capability in using the language is a kind of power. As Stein indicates,
with the red robe and white wimples, the Handmaids are all synchronized as one so that the
central power of Gilead may deprive their individuality, and Marian does not feel comfortable
with the color-coded dress. By revealing the discomfort in her red dress, Offred insinuates her
capability in using the language to construct her identity and subjectivity: “ and myself in it like a
distorted shadow, a parody of something, some fairy-tale figure in a red cloak, descending
towards a moment of carelessness that is the same as danger. A Sister, dipped in blood” (9). This
paradox in a way shows that Offred tries to turn the traditional meaning of the fairy tales or the
biblical teaching into a paradox, attempting to use language to mock Gilead society and vents
her dissatisfaction of the restricted reality. Another revision of the Aunt’s lesson is in the
teaching of not to think, which is later proved to be impossible for Offred. At night and when left
alone in her bed, she first consoles herself that if she wants to last, she has to listen to aunts’
advice: not to think too much because “[t]here’s a lot that doesn’t bear thinking about” (8),
since thinking can possibly ruin her chance and she intends to strive for living. Then, in allowing
herself to think, she associates Aunt Lydia’s instruction with that of a ballet class teacher in the
past: “She said, Think of yourselves as seeds” (18)—that is, seeing the present self-preservation
as a seed for future rebellion and changes. Offred learns to indulge herself to swerve from the
reality and wander in the word-plays. Since Gilead is a confining realm that strictly controls the
people’s movement and language, Offred’s secret word-plays becomes a monologue that also
brings along moments in her past life. It is this severe confinement in body and language that
forces her to 18 develop her individuality through imagination, reflection and rebellion. As Stein
has mentioned, the Aunts act out as women surrogates of the patriarchal power, for “[they]
transmit the words of the patriarchal government, and they silence unwanted speech” (271).
The stock of biblical phrases stressed by the Fundamentalism is a measure of controlling,
brainwashing and constraining. Teachings such as “Pen is Envy,” “Blessed be the meek,” and
“Blessed are the silent” are short memorable and yet ironical to all Handmaids. The Handmaids
are made to rehearse, memorize and thus internalize the sayings given in the Red Center. All of
this emphasis on silence and meekness makes their bodies disciplined and without really
suppressing their desire for a pen or penis. What is more ironical is the teachings like “Give me
children, or else I die,” which emphasizes women’s own desire for bearing children, but actually
suggests the consequence of failing to apparently perform this obligation. Ironically, then, giving
birth becomes literally a life-and-death matter for women even without the risks of dystocia. In
addition to the birth-death irony, the Aunt’s teaching of “Pen is Envy” also explains that verbal
constraint collaborates with bodily constraint. The rigorous regulations in Gilead forbid women
to speak freely, to have access to anything concerned with language and words, for silence and
meekness are considered virtues. Here, again Atwood plays with words through Offred’s
narration. The phrase itself could be a pun. In the realm of Gilead, where words and any tools
leading for knowledge are banned, as a writing tool, pen becomes the source of envy for Offred.
During the secret meeting with the Commander, she is allowed to read magazines and even to
write with a pen when she tries to ask a question to the Commander. As Offred recalls, the
momentary gesture of writing and holding a pen in her hands becomes erotic and sensational so
that she even feels like breaking the rule and stealing it as another act of rebellion. The pen
between my fingers is sensuous, alive almost, I can feel its power, the power of the words it
contains. Pen Is Envy, Aunt Lydia would say, quoting another Center motto, warning us away
from such objects. And they were right, it is envy. Just holding it is envy. I envy the Commander
his pen. It’s one more thing I would like to steal. (186) Apparently, Offred breaks the ban on pen
Gilead puts on women. However, one cannot help being reminded of Freud’s famous
description of women’s “Penis Envy.” As Psychoanalysis would not be the theoretical reference
for this thesis, I would like to simply say that Atwood’s witty word-play is a sarcastic comment
on man power whose absoluteness has been supported by not only Gilead but also Freud. As
the word-play games show Offred’s imagination and sensitivity to language, the puns related to
body also disclose her rebellion in a way. As Lawrence Davies 19 conceives the idea of puns and
breaking language bars, he connects Offred’s punning gesture to the behavior of someone that
“both exhilarated and alarmed by language, by its power of making and of breaking bonds”
(210). No matter what this word-playing or elaboration indicates, making/breaking the
boundaries or denying connections between words, in any ways, Offred’s power grows as she
gets access to words. For instance, Offred ponders on “habit” that the Handmaids are wearing:
“Habits are hard to break” (24-5). What she means may be ambiguous due to the meaning of
the word “habit.” It could indicate both a certain of religious ropes like the red ones that the
Handmaids wear and the custom or practice that Offred she has. She could have referred to the
prison-like durable clothing she wears, but she could also mean the word-playing games that go
on and on within her mind or her other habitual secret practices in life. Also, when Ofglen
circumambulates with the password of “Mayday,” Offred’s afterthought reveals her longing for
her past. Mayday used to be a distress signal, a long time ago in one of those wars we studied in
high school. I kept getting them mixed up, but you could tell them apart by the airplanes if you
paid attention. It was Luke who told me about mayday, though. Mayday, mayday, for pilots
whose planes had been hit, and ships. (41) She then recalls the real meaning in French, “help
me.” This short passage speaks Offred’s nostalgic feeling about the old days and her keen
awareness how words can bear different meanings and serve different functions. Most of all,
accesses to words and language have become a luxury and power in the forbidding status of an
autocratic government. As changing the language and the connection with the people
surrounding her gives Offred a sense of power, likewise, through her body, food and eating, she
discovers her power little by little. In terms of the act of seduction, she uses her body as food to
perform her scarce power. She also feels the power when she plays the scrabble with the
Commander. On the touch of the scrabble counters, Offred feels tempted by the wooden words
and would like to swallow the scrabble counters so as to retain the power. The power that she
has received from playing the scrabble game comes from her access of language and knowledge,
and makes her want to eat up the wooden word counters. Also, the words on the scrabble
board somehow remind her of the past, which reaffirms her identity secretly. And reading as
fast as possible whenever she is given the chance of reading indicates her longing for knowing
and for remembering. Gilead bans the language and words which are powerful keys to
knowledge, and this restriction reminds Offred how much she is confined; more and more, she
acknowledges what a passive role she is playing as a Handmaid. Both Klarer and Madonne Miner
discuss this language ban on reading and writing: Klarer sees it as a measure of preventing “the
‘privilege’ of objectivity from getting into the hands of 20 women” (134) whereas Miner
considers this ban of language an easy way for men to claim the authority and deprive women
of their power. Without freedom in articulation and in knowledge, at times Offred feels
distressed. In the Commander’s compound, she misses the old times and decides to take
advantage of her imagination and her memory of the old days. Like a chipmunk trapped in her
cage, the room she is not yet familiar with, she strives to explore the room gradually. And the
more she observes her surroundings in her own space, the more she thinks of the past and is
attacked by solitude: I looked up at the blind paster eye in the ceiling. I wanted to feel Luke lying
beside me. I have them, these attacks of the past, like faintness, a wave sweeping over my head.
Sometimes it can hardly be borne. What is to be done, what is to be done, I thought. There is
nothing to be done. They also serve who only stand and wait. Or lie down and wait. I know why
the glass in the window is shatterproof, and why they took down the chandelier. I wanted to
feel Luke lying beside me, but there wasn’t room. (52) The “blind paster eye in the ceiling” is the
result from a cruel past, a story and a legend of the dead Handmaid before Offred. In this
passage, she describes her loneliness and emptiness caused by the limited, prison-like
constraint; she uncovers her sense of helplessness when she thinks of her destiny which may be
like the former Handmaid or be unknown as yet. She is not left with many choices and she is
very much restricted in the space which is severely watched and controlled. She realizes her
situation as being confined by the limited space and movement. Worst of all, she is always
awaiting, for the demands, expectations and the time for rituals and routines. Not only is Offred
like a waiting woman in the attic, awaiting for the Ceremony and calls from the Commander, but
her body and mind is full of memory in terms of the consistent search of her past experience by
sensational touch and creative imagination when she is with herself. Indeed, Offred is very much
framed in Gilead, just like certain fairy tale figures framed in the fixed spot. Her red habit makes
her identify herself with the fairy-tale figures, possibly the Little Red Riding Hood or Repunzel. In
a way, she is like Little Red Riding Hood, whose body runs for others’ demands. For instance, she
is sent to run the chores by the Marthas. Later in the novel, she is also sent to Nick by Serena
Joy. While the Marthas and Serena Joy serve as the role of the practical surrogate mothers for
Offred, she is aware of her very restricted and scrutinized condition. Besides, Offred also
resembles the fairy tale figure Rapunzel. She spends most of her time waiting in her room for
the summons from the Commander, the Wife or the Marthas. Her long waiting posture in the
attic and her long hair makes her a Rapunzel. Gilead requires the Handmaids to keep long hair.
Offred’s long hair may not be as 21 beautiful as Rapunzel’s, however, the hair does not offer any
power at all, for all the Handmaids are required to put on the wimple which blocks their sight
and forces them to look straight ahead. In other words, for Offred, Gilead becomes a forest
where all the gestures and languages become dangerous as a Little Red Riding Hood, as well as
for rebellion; where Offred is, like Rapunzel, given a mere window to look at the world. Only
when she is alone in the room does she use her keen sensation to search for clues of the room
in the past, to reflect on her identity, and memory in the past. Yet, strained as her body is,
Offred knows she has to break the bond and struggles to move ahead beyond the spatial
constraint. Therefore, in her own room, where she uses her imagination to move beyond the
limited space and preserve her name, dreaming of one day that she could tell someone about
her real name. Namely, her room gives her a sense of self-preservation through which she
retains her identity and her name. Besides repeating her name secretly and reminding herself
her real identity, Offred uses her sensitivity to preserve her identity. As she grows to be more
sensitive to smell and taste, she also recalls more of her past life even when she is trapped in
the sitting room or anywhere in Gilead. In her own room, Offred learns to preserve her body
with the butter, which further indicates her instinct of maintaining her own body like the old
time. Through these gestures of self-preservation, Offred reveals her strong intention of
retaining her old identity, not as Offred, but as herself with a real name that identifies her as an
individual. More actively, she begins to rebel through various bodily actions and attempts. First,
she attempts to steal something from the sitting room, as she reveals, “I would like to steal
something from this room. I would like to take some small thing, [ ] secret it in my room” (80).
Then she wishes further to “steal” Luke from the past into her present room because she feels
like being sure of her identity and lusts for a body: I want Luke here so badly. I want to be held
and told my name. I want to be valued, in ways that I am not; I want to be more than valuable. I
repeat my former name, remind myself of what I once could do, how others saw me. I want to
steal something. (97) It is the lack of identity that makes Offred a needy person that drives her
to convince herself that Luke is somehow alive. She even believes that Luke will have a message
“[s]lipped into [her] hand as [she] reach the tokens across the counter in All Flesh” (106). When
her hope for Luke gradually fades away, she turns to Nick to satisfy her needs for self-assertion.
Nick becomes someone that she tells her real name to, and someone she goes to secretly, even
without the consent of Serena Joy. This, too, can be considered a proof of Offred’s bodily action
of rebellion against the powerful Gilead authority. Finally, her turning everything unspeakable
about Gilead, about her past and herself 22 into audible texts is by all means a form of
resistance against the language-banned society. Her thoughts, views, memory and what
happened to her have all been textualized as tapes, and that has somehow become a latent
threat to and a possible obsolete of Gilead society. That is to say, through Offred’s story-telling,
she has turned her mouth a tool of resistance because narration can be taken as an act of
reconstruction and imagination, which indeed occurs once in a while when she tells the story. As
Celia Flor?n indicated: “the transmission of the story is frequently being questioned by the
narrator” (258), at times, Offred distrusts her own story and revises her story from time to time.
But the act of revising the story, in a way, reinforces her power of narration. She becomes an
author who manipulates the audio texts. And by simply telling the story and revising the story,
she has the power of demonstrating her resistance to Gilead. She shows the same resisting spirit
when she tries to find out Ofglen’s whereabouts. Later she realizes that Ofglen sacrifices herself
to protect her; Offred becomes willing to identify with the rebellious organization at the end of
her story. Though suspecting Nick’s betrayal, she cooperates with Nick’s instruction and get onto
the Eye’s van. To this extent, she is not as passive as before and takes a more active attitude in
rebelling against the regime. In addition to her bodily action against the totalitarian, there are
two attempts of hers that show her active resistance against Gilead – one is her attempt to
make connections with people around her and with the past, and the other is her attempt to
change the language she has been forced to adapt to. Not merely with Ofglen does Offred try to
connect herself with, but with other Handmaids, the Marthas, and Nick. By building connections
with people around her, she gets to feel more strength and find out more about what’s
happening. Knowing is in itself a power, and by getting to know and to express through the
connection with others, Offred gets more power and further acts out her alternative resistance.
Moreover, by reflecting on the past, she gets to be more affirmative and determined to retain
her identity. Through repetitively assuring herself of who she really is and what has happened in
the past, she keeps her faith in living/surviving. Offred’s other attempts of challenging the
meaning of the language. In many biblical phrases and teachings that she has been forced to
memorize, she criticizes and corrects Aunts’ interpretations. When Nick speaks to her, she
merely nods and recalls what she is told by the Aunts: He isn’t supposed to speak to me. Of
course some of them will try, said Aunt Lydia. All flesh is weak. All flesh is grass, I corrected her
in my head. They can’t help it, she said, God made them that way but He did not make you that
way. He made you different. It’s up to you to set the boundaries. Later you will be thanked. (45)
Her sensitivity to language makes her pay attention to even detail and little things in people’s
talk. She corrects and criticizes those she does not agree with and try to 23 rephrase what she
has heard. For instance, she reflects how Aunt Lydia admonishes women in the past that have
made spectacles by showing off their flesh. Aunt Lydia concludes that “things” happened to
these women with a reason and lectures to Handmaids to be good because “[s]uch things do
not happen to nice women. And not good for the complexion [ ].” Those “things” she mentions
do hard to women’s complexion and made women like “dried apple” (55). Meanwhile, Offred
recalls that it is Aunt Lydia herself that has told the Handmaids not to pay attention to their
complexions. In other words, Offred mocks Aunt Lydia for her contradicting herself in the talk
addressing to the Handmaids. Little rebellion like this brings Offred more strength of remaining
her subjectivity and identity because she realizes that she has the power to change something,
like language. As she compares her reading with eating voraciously, her bodily resistance also
becomes more active than before. In the mean time, that she reckons the Commander needs
her empowers her. Gradually, Offred perceives her little power not merely from men, but from
women superior to her status. As she thinks of the possible consequences of being caught of
secretly meeting the Commander, she knows that the Commander would not risk saving her.
However, somehow she feels the power over the Wife, for she reckons: “Also: I now had power
over her, of a kind, although she didn’t know it. And I enjoyed that. Why pretend? I enjoyed it a
lot” (162). Flor?n discovers “a circle of deceit” among the Commander’s household, and in the
circle, “The handmaid deceives both the husband and the wife with Nick and the Commander,
respectively” (255). This deception further accounts for Offred’s experience of power over both
the Commander and the Wife. All in all, Offred discovers her power and realizes that she could
derive the power from her body, food and the act of eating. Although the ending of The
Handmaid’s Tale does not reveal Offred’s hwere about or whether she is dead or alive, she has
constructed a sense of subjectivity by telling the story as a record for the post-Gilead society.
Through her narration, she uses her mouth as a weapon of rebellion, and resists the severe
control and surveillance of the totalitarian Gilead regime. With very limited power that she has
received from her rare chance of reading and performing seductively in the face of men, Offred
smartly uses her body, the act of eating, food and the connection of food and her body to
perform her power. In the search of herself, her past and her identity, the power helps her build
a sense of subjectivity. As she calls her own room a “treacherous territory,” she rediscovers her
strength and manages to move beyond the limited space where she is trapped. Against a
powerful society like Gilead as she may have confronted, Offred struggles to find a way for her
to withhold her identity and subjectivity under an absolute patriarchal sovereignty. It is hard to
tell if Offred is rescued or betrayed at the 24 end of her story, which are tape records later
transcribed and rearranged into the novel by two male professors in the post Gilead time. But
with one glimpse on Atwood’s ending in The Handmaid’s Tale, it is not hard to find how neither
the society before, nor after Gilead, regime has been different that much from each other.
Namely, patriarchal domineering power which is still active in the post-Gilead society. how the
female body has always been treated as objects of male dominance. It is, finally, to such similar
situations in Taiwan that I will turn to in my conclusion.
Science fiction helps to destroy hierarchy’s- means SF is key to destroy
patriarchy
Fekete, 1 (John, Professor Emeritus of Cultural Studies and English Literature at Trent
University, as well as a member of the Cultural Studies PhD Program and the Centre for the
Study of Theory, Culture, and Politics. Recognized as an international figure in the field of
modern and postmodern theory and in the antifoundational transformation of theory from the
1970s, March 2001, “Doing the Time Warp Again: Science Fiction as Adversarial Culture,”
Science Fiction Studies, #83 = Volume 28, Part
http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/review_essays/fek83.htm)

Able to create radically different forms of thought – form post discourses (?)

Science fiction commentary today largely presupposes the democratization and decentralization
of the modern system of Art, and the revaluation made possible by the loosening of the value
hierarchy that had authorized the exalted status of a centralized high Art canon and the
correspondingly low status of the popular or commercial literatures and paraliteratures (to
which sf has tended to belong). The nuts and bolts discourse on sf nowadays shows little anxiety
about the genre’s non-canonical status. The agendas of Science Fiction Studies, the pre-eminent
regular home of academic sf scholarship, for example, have shifted during the 1990s, as indeed
the journal anticipated at the beginning of that decade (Csicsery-Ronay Jr., "Editorial"). As a
result, a variety of deconstructive and counter-canonical readings have increased the theoretical
density of the journal and given it a new-left intellectual face that is double-coded, Janus-like,
turning both to cultural critique and to a critique of the traditional presuppositions of critique. It
is interesting to note a continuing consensus in sf scholarship on advancing the adversarial
culture and producing an alternative discourse around creative writing of an alternativist
character. At the same time, critiques frequently "post" their own grounding, as happens with
other double-codings of postmodern culture, where the basic intellectual categories
(certainties) of modernity are called into question and recoded. Feminist and post-feminist,
Marxist and post-marxist, modernist and post-modernist, humanist and post-humanist,
historicist and post-historicist, gendered and post-gendered analytic and theoretic modes of
discourse step by step refashion a dialogic space that begins to appear post-critical. It is
probably fair to say that the "posting" of the adversarial culture foreseen in Baudrillard’s
hypothesis of the hyperreal reduction of distance between the fictive and the real, in Lyotard’s
libidinal aesthetic, and in the assumptions of a number of postmodern antifoundationalists, has
not yet been robustly theorized or persuasively disseminated. Nevertheless, the post-critical
horizons of science fiction discourse have been announced, even if related agendas are only
slowly and cautiously emerging. Into this context arrives Carl Freedman’s Critical Theory and
Science Fiction. In a science fiction milieu where dedicated works of theory reflecting on the
nature of science fiction itself are relatively rare, such a book is to be welcomed, especially as it
makes a real contribution by drawing attention to relationships between critical theory and sf.
At the same time, the book has a strong adversarial parti pris that seems emblematic of an
earlier time, or perhaps of the more traditional pole of an emerging debate. The book’s twin
purposes—to show that science fiction is an intrinsically critical-theoretical generic mode, and to
establish canonizing, critical-theoretical readings of five best-of-type sf texts by Stanislaw Lem,
Ursula K. Le Guin, Joanna Russ, Samuel R. Delany, and Philip K. Dick—draw a line in the sand.
The proposed generic definition and related critical canon will select out much of known science
fiction and select in a limited array of texts grounded on historiosophical or philosophical
premises that have much in common with the foundations of the selective traditions of elite
Literature. The bottom line is that a highly selective generic definition of the kind that Freedman
proposes would substantially narrow the legitimate membership of the sf genre and dovetail at
least in part with impulses toward the kind of legitimation that is neither in the interests of the
wide audiences that appreciate sf for its variety, nor any longer necessary as a strategy for
drawing academic attention to sf. On closer scrutiny, indeed, the exclusionary legitimating
argument turns out to be working the other side of the street, using the known and
demonstrable appeals of sf to legitimate a narrowly critical reading strategy.

Feminist science fiction theorists are key-instead of seeing women and nature
as objects to be “mastered” they counter this normative notion with an
alternative mindset of pressing on the importance of connection, not
exploitation, of the Earth. People would no longer seek to dominate the nature,
but seek to understand their entanglement and relationship with nature.
Donawerth, 1990 (Jane Donawerth, Professor at the University of Maryland, serves as
Director of Writing Programs, has had multiple books published, “Utopian Science:
Contemporary Feminist Science Theory and Science Fiction,” pp. 548-550, 1990, PDF from
JSTOR,)

Feminist science theorists have shown that male scientists from the seventeenth century on
have conceived of nature as a potentially unruly woman to be mastered and penetrated for her
secrets. "The image of nature that became important in the early modern period was that of a
disorderly and chaotic realm to be subdued and controlled," argues Carolyn Merchant. Nature is
conceived of by scientists as associated with women, according to Sandra Harding, and "an
immensely powerful threat that will rise up and overwhelm culture unless [it] exerts severe
controls."'9As an alternative to the destructive view of nature in traditional male science,
feminist science theorists posit a revision of nature and humanity's relation to her. "Women's
identification with earth and nature," argues Joan Rothschild, must form "the basis for
transforming our values and creating new ecological visions." Such a new science, according to
Haraway, would stress connection to, not domination over nature; according to Evelyn Fox
Keller, it would see nature not as passive but as resourceful; according to Merchant it would be
as "antihierarchical"; and according to Rose it would stress "the feminine value of harmony
with nature" (according to Rose). Such a science would seek "new and pacific relationships
between humanity and nature and among human beings themselves," argues Hilary Rose; and
according to Keller, it would seek "not the power to manipulate, but empowerment-the kind
of power that results from an understanding of the world around us, that simultaneously
reflects and affirms our connection to that world."20 Such a vision of nature has long been
implicit, and more recently, explicit in women's science fiction. In Andre Norton's Breed to Come
(1972), for example, humans return to an earth their race had almost destroyed and tell the
intelligent felines who have risen to civilization, "Do not try to change what lies about you; learn
to live within its pattern, be a true part of it." The former Terrans are warning the current ones
not to produce a destructive technology but to develop a partnership with nature. The view of
nature of men and women in works by women is often sharply different. In Sargent's The Shore
of Women(1986), women's scriptures record "the spirit of Earth, in the form of the Goddess"
speaking to women: "You gave men power over Me, and they ravaged Me. You gave them
power over yourselves, and they made you slaves. They sought to wrest my secrets from Me
instead of living in harmony with Me." As a result, women assume political power, and enforce
separation from men as well as limited technology and limited reproduction that keep the
ecology in balance. Even in the prototype of all science fiction, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein
(1818), the concept of harmony with nature is implicit, a concept that Frankenstein violates with
his science. Whereas Elizabeth's relation to nature-"the sublime shapes of the mountains, the
changes of the seasons, tempest and calm, the silence of winter, and the life and turbulence of
our Alpine summers"-was one of "admiration and delight," Frankenstein's view of "the world
was . . . a secret which I desired to divine." His obsession begins when he leaves for the all-male
society at the university where there "were men who had penetrated deeper" than those who
"had partially unveiled the face of Nature, but [to whom] her immortal lineaments were still a
wonder and a mystery." In utopian fictions by women science fiction writers, the most common
metaphor for the relation of humans to nature is "the web of nature." In Piercy's, Woman on
the Edge of Time (1976) Luciente warns Connie, "We're part of the web of nature," when she
urges putting immortality, or at least longevity, as a major goal of science; and in Joan
Slonczewski's Door into Ocean (1986), scientists facilitate nature's own processes, "when the
web stretches . . . to balance life and death." Thus feminist science theorists and women science
fiction writers share a utopian vision of nature and science in partnership.2' As a result of the
inclusion of women in science, feminist historians of science and science theorists have argued
that a revised science would be different because of the culturally different qualities assigned to
women. A feminist science will include acknowledgement of subjectivity in its methods; it will
look at problems not just analytically but also holistically ; it will aim for the complex answer as
best and most honest; and it will be decentralized and organized cooperatively. In all these
ways, a feminist science is utopian, since these conditions, values, and goals do not describe
contemporary science. In feminist science theory, subjectivity as an ideal includes feelings,
intuition, and values. "A feminist epistemology [for the sciences]," writes Hilary Rose, "insists on
the scientific validity of the subject, on the need to unite cognitive and affective domains; it
emphasizes holism, harmony, and complexity rather than reductionism, domination, and
linearity." In A Feeling for the Organism, Evelyn Fox Keller reads Barbara Mc- Clintock's scientific
career as an example of allowing "the objects of . . . study [to] become subjects in their own
right," thus "fostering a sense of the limitations of the scientific method, and an appreciation of
other ways of knowing." A study by scientist Jan Harding suggests that girls in our society who
choose scientific careers more often than boys who do so recognize that "science has social
implications," and choose science as a means of developing "relatedness, capacity for concern,
and an ability to see things from another's perspective." Subjectivity in science must also
encompass values and ethical context: science must be "context dependent" according to
Merchant, connected to "social implications" according to Jan Harding, based on "relational
thinking" according to Hein, grounded in women's experience and, so, a "labor of love"
according to Rose.22
Feminist science fiction makes us reflect on the history of science and its
impacts on women
Donawerth, 1990 (Jane Donawerth, Professor at the University of Maryland, serves as
Director of Writing Programs, has had multiple books published, “Utopian Science:
Contemporary Feminist Science Theory and Science Fiction,” pp. 537-539, 1990, PDF from
JSTOR, Accessed: 6/25/14, RH)

The concern for increased participation by women in science has an analogous utopian
reflection in science fiction by women. A crucial difference between the science depicted in
men's science fiction and women's science fiction is, quite simply, the participation of women. In
Metamorphoses of Science Fiction, Darko Suvin has rightfully pointed out the lack of women
scientists in American science fiction (but failed to add that he had read almost exclusively
science fiction by men). Since at least the early 1960s, women writers have regularly
characterized women as scientists; examples include Mary, biologist and specialist in alien
communication in Naomi Mitchison's Memoirs of a Spacewoman (1962); the biologist Takver
and the physicist Mitis in Ursula K. Le Guin's The Dispossessed (1974); Kira, biologist, M.D., and
"the de facto head of her department at the university" in Pamela Sargent's Cloned Lives (1972-
76); Margaret, the black computer expert in Up the Walls of the World (1978) by James Tiptree,
Jr. (Alice Sheldon); Varian, vet- erinary xenobiologist and co-leader of the expedition in Anne
Mc- Caffrey's Dinosaur Planet Survivors (1984); and Jeanne Velory, black physicist and astronaut
in Vonda McIntyre's Barbary (1986). Even the earliest woman writer for the pulp magazines,
Clare Winger Harris, in a 1928 short story, includes a woman scientist: Hildreth, chemist and
astronomer, assistant to her father in his home laboratory and soon to be assistant to her new
husband. This interest of women science fiction writers in women scientists seems not only a
result of changes in women's careers in the 1960s but also of the struggle to educate women in
the sciences in the late nineteenth century.4 Women scientists as characters in women's science
fiction, moreover, seem a legacy of the earlier feminist utopias. In Mary Bradley Lane's Mizora
(1880-81), for example, chemists and mechanical engineers make the all-woman society a
technological utopia. And in Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland (1915), female geneticists have
bred crop-producing and disease-resistant trees, as well as quiet cats that do not kill birds, while
other women have developed sciences unknown to Gilman's con- temporaries-language as a
science, sanitation, nutrition, and a kind of psychology-history. The feminist utopias, as well as
contemporary wom-en's science fiction, make us see a history of women in science, not just a
few great women who seem to be historical anomalies. In one of the earliest feminist utopias,
ThreeHundred YearsHence (1836), written when most women were still denied college
educations, Mary Griffith shows a future historian relating a woman's invention of a new power
that replaces steam, as well as restoring proper credit to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, "for
introducing into England the practice of inoculation for the small-pox." Such a vision of restoring
women to the history of science is shared by Naomi Mitchison in Memoirs of a Spacewoman;her
hero Mary reflects: I may be out of date, but I always feel that biology and, of course,
communication are essentially women's work, and glory. Yes, I know there have been physicists
like Yin Ih and molecular astronomers-I remember old Jane Rakadsalismyself, her wonderful
black, ageless face opening into a great smile! But somehow the disciplines of life seem more
congenial to most of us women.5 In 1962, when many colleges were still effectually segregated
by race and want ads were still separated by gender into male and female occupations,
Mitchison presents, as a matter of course, the participation of women of color in science. What
these utopian and science fiction writers offer, more importantly than portraits of individual
women scientists, is a revision of past and future science history that includes women as rightful
participants. In this way, they share a goal with feminist historians of science.
 Blocks
Method
There are two facets of this method

1. Writing and storytelling is an act of resistance – the bodies of the oppressed are
disciplined to be silent. Writing in the world of the Handmaidens is reserved to those in
powers because only they are allowed to But writing allows for personal expression –
Offreds storytelling is unique in that it breaks the silence of the oppressed. Offred
inhabits the room of a handmaiden who came before her and left her own writing on
the walls of te cell. Her writing motivated offredd to begin her own. In this way writing
and storytelling are ways of a3akening resistance to systems of domination. Offred
invents a story for the handmaiden beofr3 her and in doing so breaks her own silence
and begins to reclaim her own body. The handmaidens tale is as a whole the writing left
on the wall for us. Our reading is a way of opeining a room for imagination and
theorizing of the experiences of female body.
2. Feminist stuff as a whole is Able to create radically different forms of thought – form
post discourses

Answers to Other K’s

Dystopia’s open up a space for critical analysis and radical otherness

Multiple stories necessary offreds contruction fo stories forms the view of the society each
provides different parts and experiences-- perm

Pushing of womens stories to the back- instead perm

Surveillance
The surveillance of the female body which leads to its public ownership and interpelation

The surveillance of writings and story to reclaim the female body

Fw Answers
Limiting of creativity

They play the role of the aunts – they rule out which discourse is considered unnacceptable

Attempt to make real

Refuse the personalization fo the 1ac – returning the female body to the public domain

Their fw is the male gaze – censoring our writing even if it is a better method this inherently
takes out any solvency
 Being Cut
http://academinist.org/wp-
content/uploads/2010/06/MP0304_02_Steuber_Atwood.pdf
In this section of the novel, the community “Prayvaganza” takes place to reaffirm the
stratification in the Gilead society. Because the kinship system is endorsed through rituals and
gains momentum and strength through public rituals, the “Prayvaganza” is an exemplary mode
of obedience to the system. Ranks of folding wooden chairs have been placed along the right
side, for the Wives and daughters of high-ranking officials or officers, there’s not that much
difference. The galleries above, with their concrete railings, are for the lowerranking women,
the Marthas, the Econowives in their multicolored stripes…Our area is cordoned off with a silky
twisted scarlet rope. (Atwood 213-214) What Offred describes is the visual separation of the
women at the Prayvaganza by the level to which they belong. Atwood pays special attention to
the detail of the language in this passage to emphasize the boundaries between the different
women that intensify the levels of oppression. Her use of the words “ranks of folding chairs” to
describe the higher-ranking women, who are recipients of the exchanges of Handmaids along
with the Commanders, places MP: An Online Feminist Journal Spring 2012: Vol. 3, Issue 4 20
distinct emphasis on the social status of the Wives and their proximity to the militaristic state
the enforces the laws of Gilead. When describing the Marthas and Econowives she uses
“concrete railings” to describe the barrier and relate it directly to the strong undesired mixing
with the other members at the Prayvaganza. The description of the Econowives wearing
“multicolored stripes” elicits two associations for the reader, one of convicts and the other as a
potential reference to ethnicity that really depicts their status as inescapable. Finally, the
Handmaids are separated with a “silky twisted scarlet rope” that is reminiscent of fertility,
blood, and even female anatomy; this description and the softness of the language reflects the
kind of physical care that is extended to the Handmaids. After all, the women in good “working”
condition, ready to produce babies. This kind of kinship stratification in society produces the
utmost level of control as portrayed in the novel. While all the women are assigned specific roles
within the “family” of the household, the emotional bonds and true camaraderie are eliminated
by additional restrictions such as prohibiting conversation on the street and the Handmaid’s
responsibility to have a child on behalf of the Wives. The women are oppressed as an entire
group as a gender by the kinship system in Gilead, and also oppressed within their social
divisions within the gender.

This Gileadean society, where men have more opportunities to exercise freedom, also enforces
a strict gender/sexuality prescription through its kinship organization that requires the men to
conform to the system as well. “For although he wants to make Offred’s life more bearable and
although he can be ‘positively daddyish’ in his behavious, he also affirms the male supremist
ideology which subordinate and sexually enslave women” (Bouson 145-146). Offred, as a
Handmaid, is seen only has a vehicle of reproduction, but the Commander struggles with this
separation of emotion from the physical coital connection. He desires a deeper connection with
her emotionally and intellectually through the Scrabble game and he desires a freer sexual
connection with her that he attempts to fulfill at Jezebel’s. “He’s stroking my body now, from
stem as they say to stern, cat stroke along the left flank, down the left leg. He stops at the foot,
his fingers encircling the ankle, briefly, like a bracelet, where the tattoo is, a Braille he can read,
a cattle brand. It means ownership” (Atwood 254). This passage clearly reveals the
Commander’s desire for physical contact that has feelings behind it, but it is clear, from the
Braille tattoo, that he is not capable of attaining that in this society. While behind closed doors
he feels comfortable extending more conventionally romantic emotions, but in the public eye of
Jezebel’s he must treat her as property: “He retains hold of my arm, and as he talks his spine
straightens imperceptibly, his chest expands, his voice assumes more and more sprightliness
and jocularity of youth. It occurs to me he is showing me off” (Atwood 236). Therefore,
attending a place like Jezebel’s allows the Commander to both subvert the lack of lust and
feeling in society and also further exercise his place in the kinship system. He affirms his place in
society as an owner of women and also shares an intimate moment of forbidden physical
contact with Offred. MP: An Online Feminist Journal Spring 2012: Vol. 3, Issue 4 23 “The power
of males in these groups is not founded on their roles as fathers or patriarchs, but on their
collective adult maleness, embodied in secret cults, men’s houses, warfare, exchange networks,
ritual knowledge, and various initiation procedures” (Rubin 34). Jezebel’s becomes the place
where sexuality is enforced and sexuality is also explored. These elements of enforcement and
creation are further explicated in Davina Cooper’s Power in Struggle: “As a form of disciplinary
power, sexuality organizes identity…and social interactions around particular desires, libidinal
practices and social relations. At the same time, it constructs and articulates desires, libidinal
practices and social relations” (Cooper 67). Jezebel’s is the intersection, in the novel, where
control, power, and gender/sexuality meet. It is the one place where women have some power
over their own sexual expression and also they have power over the sexual needs of the men of
Gilead.

The relationship between these two characters is truncated in the novel but it offers adequate
interaction to explicate the old and new views on sex that Atwood satirizes. Offred sees Moira as
someone with courage but also is intimidated by her assertiveness and contentment with her
existence in Jezebel’s. J. Brooks Bouson has asserted that “the Handmaids also find something
frightening in Moira’s freedom…Ultimately crossquestioning the possibility of female heroism in
such a regime, the narrative, while MP: An Online Feminist Journal Spring 2012: Vol. 3, Issue 4
29 typecasting Moira as a feminist rebel, also dramatizes her defeat. Caught, tortured, and then
forced into prostitution, Moira ultimately loses her volition and becomes indifferent” (Bouson
151). Bouson’s reading of Moira neglects to take into account any lesbian/queer theory; the
interpretation reflects the same ignorance that is intended to be exposed through Moira’s
situation. A more accurate interpretation is that Moira’s existence among other women allows
her to express her true sexuality and experience female nurturing, while subverting the
hierarchy. Adrienne Rich points out that “women’s choice of women as passionate comrades,
life partners, co-workers, lovers, tribe, has been crushed, [and] invalidated” (Rich 632). Bouson’s
interpretation perpetuates this crushing of women’s relationships in society. While Moira, lives
only in Jezebel’s, it is the only place where she can attempt to exercise the female bonds and
sexual expression that is prohibited in society proper. Moira is not “indifferent” as Bouson
asserts, but she is working to subvert the system in ways that will benefit her sexual expression.
Therefore, Bouson’s interpretation perpetuates the misunderstanding of “lesbian sexual
difference…that cannot be comprehended from within the most common definitions of
heterosexual difference” (Adams 476). Atwood’s inclusion of Moira’s inability to fit into the
sexuality in the society has a direct correlation to the instances of gay prejudice in contemporary
American society. The perceived dramatic nature of Moira’s situation is also alluded to in the
novel because it is meant as a commentary on the concept of gender and sexuality as a
performative act. Moira’s role as a heterosexual prostitute at Jezebel’s illustrates the MP: An
Online Feminist Journal Spring 2012: Vol. 3, Issue 4 30 falsity that socially constructed gender
and sexuality pervades. In an interview between Butler and Rubin the following comment arose:
As soon as you get away from the presumptions of heterosexuality, differences in sexual
conduct are not very intelligible in terms of binary models…There needs to be some kind of
model that is not binary, because sexual variation is a system of many differences, not just a
couple of salient ones” (Rubin and Butler 81). This assumption of a binary sexuality system is
precisely the mindset that led to the misreading of Moira’s situation at Jezebel’s and the
subsequent assumption of her unhappiness. Moira concedes to Offred that “it’s not so bad,
there’s lots of women around. Butch paradise, you might call it” (Atwood 249). Her happiness is
in the freedom to express her sexuality and at Jezebel’s she is able to do so; with her freedom of
sexual expression Moira may have her true identity within this niche in Gilead. Additionally, the
correlation to Moira’s sexuality and her assertive desire for freedom and power also aim to
subvert both the Gilead society and contemporary society. “Sexual assertiveness and women’s
full, empowered participation in sexual decision making are clearly restricted [in society]. Each
of the factors… gender expectations, social controls, childhood victimization and the various
source of dependence on men – can be conceptualized individually, but operate in an
interactive manner to limit women’s sexual autonomy” (Travis and White 312). Women’s power
is controlled socially by both gender stratification such as the kinship system and sexuality
through MP: An Online Feminist Journal Spring 2012: Vol. 3, Issue 4 31 performance acts. A
commonly held standard in contemporary society and in Gilead is that it is unacceptable for
women to be sexually forward and seek sexual power, as Moira does in this novel. Atwood
purposely foils Moira with Offred as to compare two spheres: assertive and submissive, and
homosexual and heterosexual. By paralleling homosexuality with assertiveness and subversion
in Gilead, Atwood reveals the stereotypes and struggle that these women experienced during
the Women’s Liberation and still experience in today’s society. However, Moira’s personality
and perseverance puts forth a hope for the future of the sex/gender system. Moira makes
multiple attempts at escapes to attain some kind of ability to exercise freedom, while Offred is
content with merely fantasizing about subverting the system.

In this section of the novel Atwood combines despair and hope. While Jezebel’s is a secret club
that serves to support the power in the kinship system, it is also a place where two of the
oppressed women of Gilead are able to find some kind of freedom, if only temporarily. Atwood
uses Jezebel’s to explore the reader’s prejudices against homosexuality and also to make strong
assertions about sexuality stereotypes in society. “Masculine women tend to be read, at least
initially, as lesbians, while feminine lesbians tend to be read as heterosexuals” (Queen 293). The
way that sexuality and gender are fused together in Gilead is a direct parallel to the way they
are linked in contemporary American society. The prevailing hypocrisy in the novel is also
something worth noting: “In order to survive they and the narrator among them are constantly
obliged to pretend to espouse a system of values which denigrates and threatens to annihilate
them” (Hammer 40). The prevalent correlation to contemporary social issues makes this novel a
poignant piece of satire. MP: An Online Feminist Journal Spring 2012: Vol. 3, Issue 4 34 While
some critics view The Handmaid’s Tale as a large satire of society and the controls of society, it
also delineates how social control can weave its way into the most private and intimate aspects
of life. The way that Gilead devises a system to control the construction of the family unit, the
reproduction of people, and the conformity to strict sexuality codes is not far off from social
constructions of contemporary society. Though the kinship system described by Rubin has
evolved in the United States and women are not only seen as a commodity in the home, women
are still struggling to achieve equality in the workplace. “Although most women in the United
States are employed in the paid workforce, they have lower wages than men, are concentrated
in different occupations, and are thinly represented at the highest levels of organizational
hierarchies” (Eagly and Wood 274). There are also certain professions in which women are still
not equally represented, and ironically many lesbians are acting as the trailblazers in those fields
because they do not mind to be considered more masculine in doing so. Through the various
characters of The Handmaid’s Tale analyzed above, Atwood promoted the possibility of social
change. Moira’s character champions the Women’s Liberation movement in areas of gender and
sexual equality. Atwood’s depictions are particularly interesting considering that current
research shows “the dominant ethos among lesbian, gay men, and bisexuals is of egalitarian
relationships” (Sinfield 59). Perhaps with the deregulation of sexual hegemony there can be a
complete eradication of the oppressive kinship system and also elimination of compulsory
heterosexuality. Thus, the disappearance of oppressive gender and sexual systems has the
potential to conjure heightened equality in society
 Cards Cut

Analysis of capitalist privilege is key to understanding intersectionality in the

context of the Handmaids Tale

Many scholars, both male and female alike, dismiss the Aunts in Margaret Atwood’s The
Handmaid’s Tale as having a token power granted to them by the Commanders in Gilead. In fact,
the males in positions of Commanders are given full responsibility for creating and maintaining
the Gileadan theocracy many years after the dissolution of Gilead in the novel’s blatantly satiric
epilogue. Lee Briscoe Thompson in her book Scarlet Letters: Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s
Tale believes that lecturer Professor James Darcy Pieixoto’s “real interest” is in “the male power
elite of Gilead” which means that he would dismiss any female involvement (53). Karen Stein in
her article “Margaret Atwood’s Modest Proposal: The Handmaid’s Tale” describes the dystopic
Gilead in this manner: “In the guise of a re-population program, Gilead reads the biblical text
literally and makes it the basis for the state-sanctioned rape, the impregnation ceremony the
handmaids must undergo each month” (195). The society is obviously founded upon principles
that negate the rights of women, which would lead readers to believe that no woman, let alone
a group of women, could have the type and the strength of the power of the Commanders.
Critics such as Roberta Rubenstein in her article “Nature and Nurture in Dystopia: The
Handmaid’s Tale” believe that the Aunts only “retain power in the puritanical state through
their role as indoctrinators of the handmaids” (104). This paper would argue that the Aunts
were created by Atwood and portrayed in such a manner as to suggest that they have as much if
not more power as the Commanders have. Nebula 1.2, September 2004 Johnson: The Aunts as
an Analysis of Feminine Power… 69 Atwood has a history of placing powerful females in her
novels who use their power against other females, and the Aunts in The Handmaid’s Tale are a
clear type of this feminine power. The Aunts fall into the long tradition of females with power in
Atwood’s novels. Cat’s Eye, Atwood’s novel immediately following The Handmaid’s Tale
continues this tradition. While most of the criticism concerning Cat’s Eye is about Elaine Risley’s
ability to find her own power (after being tortured by her childhood friend), Cordelia and her
treatment of Elaine are reminiscent of the Aunts and their treatment of females, and the
handmaids in particular. According to J. Brooks Bouson, The Handmaid’s Tale anticipates Cat’s
Eye’s dramatization of the female-directed oppression of women (which begins during the
girlhood socialization process) and it describes the brutal reeducation of the Handmaids, who
are coerced by the Aunts to forego the ideology of women’s liberation and to revert to the
‘traditional’ values of a male-dominated system” (141). Atwood intentionally created the Aunts
as powerful females in a dystopia. In a radio conversation with fellow writer Victor-Levy
Beaulieu, she said that the character of Aunt Lydia “is based on the history of imperialisms. For
example, the British in India raised an army of Indians to control the rest of the Indians…So, if
you want to control women, you have to grant some women a tiny bit more power so that
they’ll control the others” (Atwood and Beaulieu 78). In a BBC World Book Club radio program
last year, Margaret Atwood stated: “I think the Aunts [in The Handmaid’s Tale] have quite a bit
of power…Naturally, they would have to answer to a top level of men” (4 Aug. 2003). And during
Professor Pieixoto’s examination of the Gileadan theocracy in the novel’s epilogue, he clearly
notes Atwood’s observation: Nebula 1.2, September 2004 Johnson: The Aunts as an Analysis of
Feminine Power… 70 Judd – according to the Limkin material – was of the opinion from the
outset that the best and most cost-effective way to control women…was through women
themselves. For this there were many historical precedents; in fact, no empire imposed by force
or otherwise has ever been without this feature: control of the indigenous members by their
own group (390). By taking this power offered to them, the Aunts were therefore able to
“escape redundancy, and consequent shipment to the infamous Colonies, which were
composed of portable populations used mainly as expendable toxic-cleanup squads, though if
lucky could be assigned to less hazardous tasks, such as cotton picking and fruit harvesting”
(390-91). According to Thompson, it is “the pleasures of power” that “seal the deal” along with
the “small perks” and “personal security.” Thompson claims the Aunts to be “a classic depiction
of Victim Position #1 as described in Atwood’s analysis of victimhood in her literary study
Survival” (51). While the Aunts may be victims of a male hierarchy, they certainly choose to
utilize the power that they have over other women. Linda Myrsiades in her article “Law,
Medicine, and the Sex Slave in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale” simply categorizes the
Aunts as “a class of women assigned to educate the handmaids to their roles as surrogates”
(227). David Coad in his article “Hymens, Lips and Masks: The Veil in Margaret Atwood’s The
Handmaid’s Tale” limits the role of the Aunts by saying that they are merely “sadistic
propagandists” (54). It could be argued, however, that the Aunts are responsible for sustaining
the rituals of the Gileadan society, and not only the training of the Handmaids at the Rachel and
Leah Reeducation Center. When Janine, or Ofwarren, is ready to give birth, Aunt Elizabeth
Nebula 1.2, September 2004 Johnson: The Aunts as an Analysis of Feminine Power… 71 plays an
integral part in the birthing process for both Janine and the Commander’s wife (158-62). At the
assembly of the Handmaids, Aunt Lydia directs both the Salvaging and the Particicution
ceremonies (352-60). Lucy M. Freibert in her article “Control and Creativity: The Politics of Risks
in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale” describes both ceremonies in this manner: “At the
hangings each Handmaid must touch the rope in assent to the murders. At Particicutions the
Handmaids ritually dismember any man accused of rape. The Aunts supply the rhetoric that
arouses the women to savagery” (284-85). The Aunts are also responsible for directing the
females who are not Handmaids. When Offred goes with the Commander to the club, which
serves as a brothel for the Commanders, she is surprised to see that an Aunt is responsible for
regulating the behavior of her friend Moira and the other prostitutes. The Aunt determines
when the prostitutes take their breaks and for how long the breaks are (313). The Aunt also
determines whether they need to lose weight in their positions and will punish them if they are
overweight (309). A comparison of the Aunts’ responsibility and the Commanders’ responsibility
shows that the Commanders are in charge of much lighter duties. A Commander officiates the
arranged marriages service (282-83). The Commander is responsible for reading Bible passages
to his household (114). The Commander is also responsible for impregnating the Handmaid in
order to continue Gilead (122). It is clear that that the Aunts have more responsibilities in the
Gileadan theocracy than merely educating women for service as Handmaids. Most scholarly
criticism focuses on the Aunts’ responsibility for maintaining the Rachel and Leah Reeducation
Center. According to Barbara Hill Rigney in her book Margaret Atwood, “the control agency in
this novel is, not the commanders, but the Nebula 1.2, September 2004 Johnson: The Aunts as
an Analysis of Feminine Power… 72 ‘Aunts’, who run their re-education centres with cattle
prods, torture techniques, and brain washing slogans” (118). The Aunts have very clear goals
that they want to accomplish with their training of the Handmaids. The first is to delete the
women from history: “All official records of the handmaids would have been destroyed upon
their entry into the Rachel and Leah Re-education Center” (387). The second goal is to teach
women how to betray other women. Offred learns from the Aunts that “the only storytellings
permitted or rewarded are informing on others or testifying against oneself” (Thompson 59).
The handmaids learn that their behavior will be reported if it is thought to undermine the
Gileadan regime. According to the Aunts, “friendships were suspicious” (91). Aunt Lydia wants
Janine to listen to the other handmaids and tell her if anyone had helped Moira to escape (171).
Ironically, after all of Janine’s efforts to appease the Aunts, she has a mental breakdown when
her baby is deemed a Shredder rather than a Keeper (361). The Aunts’ final goal is to teach the
handmaids that rape is acceptable. They are able to utilize Janine’s gang rape to further this
lesson as they wear her down and make her realize that her gang rape was her fault (93). The
other handmaids learn how to call Janine a crybaby and jeer at her when she cries and is upset
(93). Janine’s gang rape story is a pivotal element in teaching the handmaids that ritualistic rape
at the hands of their Commanders will not only be tolerated but also encouraged. Eleonora Rao
in her book Strategies for Identity: The Fiction of Margaret Atwood notes that Moira is one
female who “survives intact the programme of conditioning into the acceptance of female guilt
and evil imposed on the handmaids at the Centre” (20). The Aunts are not only training the
Handmaids, they are creating women who will not only submit to their Commanders but also
further the goals of the Gileadan theocracy. Nebula 1.2, September 2004 Johnson: The Aunts as
an Analysis of Feminine Power… 73 A clear indication that the Aunts have a more elevated
status than other females in Gilead, including the wives, is the power that they hold above other
females. Thompson agrees with me about this, describing the Aunts as “a paramilitary cadre in
charge of indoctrinating Handmaids and enforcing female (even Wifely) obedience to the new
rules” (32). Thompson goes on to say that “the Aunts wear army khaki without veils, befitting
their quasi-military role, and reminiscent of the fascistic Brownshirts of World War II (not to
mention the no less fascist childhood Brownie troop uniforms of other Atwood fiction!)” (32).
Thompson states that the other females are not allowed to wear the “Aunt khaki since they
have no administrative powers” (32). Included in the Aunts’ administrative powers is the use of
violence and other methods to fight resistance from other females. At the Rachel and Leah
Reeducation Center, the Aunts have the power to put “some kind of pill or drug” in the food to
keep the handmaids disoriented so that they won’t resist in the beginning (91). Offred notes
that when Moira arrives at the Center she has a bruise on her left cheek (91). When Dolores, a
handmaid in training, wets the floor because she isn’t allowed to go to the bathroom, the Aunts
haul her away and the handmaids listen to her moan all night after she returns (93). For Moira’s
first attempt at escaping from the Center, she is beaten with steel cables on both of her feet and
the other handmaids have to carry her because she can’t walk (118). The Aunts are very honest
about their willingness to use violence to accomplish their goals: “Remember. For our purposes
your feet and your hands are not essential” (118). The Aunts’ use of violence is important
because even the wives are not allowed to use force to abuse or punish the handmaids. Another
power that the Aunts have in comparison to the other female characters is the permission to
publicly read and write. No woman is allowed to read and Nebula 1.2, September 2004 Johnson:
The Aunts as an Analysis of Feminine Power… 74 write in Gileadan society. On the night of the
handmaid’s impregnation Ceremony, the Commander unlocks the drawer that holds the Bible
and reads aloud to the women in his household (112). Only the Commanders and the Aunts are
allowed to read and write. Central to understanding the power of the Aunts is Moira’s successful
escape in the guise of an Aunt from the Rachel and Leah Reeducation Center and future
servitude as a handmaid. Moira forcibly exchanges clothing with an Aunt and instantly becomes
a respectable, powerful woman in Gileadan society (170-71). Moira had previously attempted to
use her own power and wit by faking the symptoms of scurvy and was unable to escape from
the Center (115). Wearing Aunt Elizabeth’s clothing, Moira walks out of the Center and past the
barricades set up to prevent women from leaving Gilead (170-71). Moira doesn’t have to explain
the nature of her business to any of the male security personnel (170-71). She does end up at
the Commanders’ club under the watchful eye of an Aunt, but she isn’t executed nor is she
banished to an Unwoman colony (324). As Moira explains to Offred when they find each other
at the club, “I couldn’t believe how easy it was to get out of the Center. In that brown outfit I
just walked right through. I kept on going as if I knew where I was heading, till I was out of sight.
I didn’t have any great plan; it wasn’t an organized thing, like they thought…” (317). Even Moira
and Offred are surprised that Aunts are respected in the Gileadan theocracy. The Commanders’
behavior is more suggestive of freedom for women than the Aunts’ behavior. Sema Kormali in
her article “Feminist Science Fiction: The Alternative Worlds of Piercy, Elgin and Atwood” states
that “it is the Aunts, as best exemplified by Aunt Lydia, who are probably the most guilty of
enforcing this patriarchal/totalitarian Nebula 1.2, September 2004 Johnson: The Aunts as an
Analysis of Feminine Power… 75 rule on the members of their own sex” (75). Furthermore,
Karen Stein in her book Margaret Atwood Revisited states that the role of Aunt Lydia [and the
other Aunts] is to control “women’s appetites for freedom and knowledge, slimming down their
minds and behaviors to be acceptable to Gilead’s social standards” (82). When Offred goes with
the Commander to the club, she views her and the Commander’s behavior as “…flaunting, such
a sneer at the Aunts, so sinful, so free” (299). The Commander allows Offred rights that the
Gileadan regime and the Aunts deny her. In his study, the Commander shares women’s
magazines such as Vogue and novels with her (200-03, 238). Offred is able to write out words
while she is playing Scrabble with the Commander (199). Furthermore, Offred says “the
Commander was patient when I hesitated, or asked him for a correct spelling” (199). This
behavior of the Commander’s demonstrates his willingness for her to possibly relearn what she
has forgotten and to increase her own vocabulary. Another way that he helps her is by
explaining what the saying “Nolite te bastardes carborundorum” inscribed on her bedroom floor
means (242). When Serena Joy later reprimands Offred for spending intimate time with her
husband, she alludes to the fact that the Commander engaged in similar activities with the
former handmaid in their household (368-69). This admission of Serena’s confirms Offred’s
suspicion that she is not the only handmaid to have been inside the Commander’s study to learn
what “Nolite te bastardes carborundorum” means (240). While the Commanders are
undermining the Gileadan theocracy with their behavior, the Aunts are promoting the future of
Gilead. The Aunts consider the group of women that Offred is a part of to be the “transitional
generation. It is the hardest for you.…For the ones who come after you, it will be easier” (151).
The Aunts tell the Nebula 1.2, September 2004 Johnson: The Aunts as an Analysis of Feminine
Power… 76 handmaids that the next generation “will accept their duties with willing hearts.…
Because they won’t want what they can’t have” (151). The Aunts have a greater capacity for
imagining what the future will be like for women in Gilead: “what we’re aiming for is a spirit of
camaraderie among women” (287). Bouson finds this aim “ironic” because the Aunts “uphold
the male supremist power structure of Gilead with its hierarchical arrangement of the sexes,
and they play an active role in the state’s sexual enslavement of the Handmaids” (141). When
the Commander takes Offred to the club, he makes it very clear that the club was created so
that “it’s like walking into the past” (306). The costumes that Offred and the other women wear
at the club are reminiscent of the time before Gilead. Even Offred is shocked: “such cloth –
feathers, mauve, pink” (298). And when they arrive, the Commander announces proudly to her
that there are “no nicotineand-alcohol taboos here!” (310). Offred observes that the
Commander is “in the courtly phase” like past relations between men and women (297). Not
only has the Commander kissed Offred on her mouth, which is a forbidden act between a
Commander and a handmaid, but also at the club he takes her hand “and kisses it, on the palm”
(310). As if they were two teenagers learning the rules of love at a high school dance, at the club
the Commander surprises Offred with a room key: “I thought you might enjoy it for a change”
(331). Corel Ann Howells observes that in The Handmaid’s Tale “individual freedom of choice
has been outlawed and everyone has been drafted into the service of the state, classified
according to prescribed roles: Commanders, Wives, Aunts, Handmaids, Eyes, down to Guardians
and Econowives” (127-28). What stands out in her observation is how she has used the word
“everyone,” which suggests that the Commanders do not have Nebula 1.2, September 2004
Johnson: The Aunts as an Analysis of Feminine Power… 77 power over the Aunts. In
contradistinction, Freibert refuses to acknowledge that the Aunts have any type of power or
knowledge in Gilead’s society. She places the Commanders, Eyes, Angels, and Guardians in a
military hierarchy and only points out that “at the Rachel and Leah Center, the Aunts use electric
cattle prods to keep the Handmaids in line” (Freibert 281-82). Freibert’s hierarchy of power is
refuted by Atwood’s own skillful portrayal of exactly how involved the Aunts were with the
design of the Gileadan society in a conversation between Moira and Offred. Moira explains to
Offred: “What I didn’t know of course was that in those early days the Aunts and even the
[Reeducation] Center were hardly common knowledge. It was all secret at first, behind barbed
wire. There might have been objections to what they were doing, even then. So, although
people had seen the odd Aunt around, they weren’t really aware of what they were for” (319).
The Aunts are part of the long tradition of powerful females in Atwood’s fiction and The
Handmaid’s Tale provides much evidence to support this claim. Atwood portrays the Aunts in
such a manner as to suggest that they have as much if not more power as the males in positions
of Commanders in The Handmaid’s Tale.

The state in a dystopian novel

Gerhard, 2012 (Julia. CONTROL AND RESISTANCE IN THE DYSTOPIAN NOVEL: A COMPARATIVE
ANALYSIS. Thesis. California State University, Chico, 2012. <http://csuchico-
dspace.calstate.edu/bitstream/handle/10211.4/434/4%2018%202012%20Julia%20Gerhard.pdf?
sequence=1>. 61-62 ZJN)

To sum up, the

dystopian novel depicts how the totalitarian state exploits, regulates and controls
the human body and mind via disciplinary coercions to ensure its full productivity-potential and
utter submission. According to Foucault, the state treats “the body as object and target of power ” (136),
intending to eventually produce “a bodyweapon, body-tool, body-machine complex” (153). This strategy fulfills two goals at once:
the more docile and obedient the body becomes, the more useful and productive a tool it evolves into. Elaborating on this
disciplinary tactic, Foucault argues that “the disciplinary coercion establishes in the body the constricting link between an increased
aptitude and an increased domination” (138). Dystopian novels portray various disciplinary coercions that
achieve both a docile and productive body. The routine that the government instills in people warrants the creation
of docile bodies and ensures their docility in every aspect of everyday life. As Foucault contends, the prescribed timetable develops
“a collective and obligatory rhythm,” “assures the elaboration of the act itself,” “controls its development and its stages from the
inside” (152). Also, prearranged
social functions, with which each dystopian citizen is labeled in
dystopian society, become another embodiment of the discipline. This type of disciplinary control ensures
that each body is used to its full potential and can be of advantage to the state’s well being. This in turn is achieved through ideology
and indoctrination so that the body becomes willingly submissive and fails to view its exploitation as anything aberrant, or, as
Althusser puts it, turns into “the subject” of ideology (163). Besides the routine and social functions, reproduction and personal
relationships fall into the iron grip of government discipline as 62 well. With this eugenic control, the number of bodies that the
government owns can be easily regulated, thus increasing the productivity of the state. Since natural forms of parenting are
eliminated, the state can now raise and educate its young citizens through ideology to produce obedient and industrious future
generations. Lastly, to ensure the docility of the body, the state employs a strict system of ubiquitous surveillance, which, according
to Foucault, “had to be like a faceless gaze that transformed the whole social body into a field of perception: thousands of eyes
posted everywhere” to police and monitor the actions and thoughts of each citizen (214).

Offred’s narration as an act of resistance

Gerhard, 2012 (Julia. CONTROL AND RESISTANCE IN THE DYSTOPIAN NOVEL: A COMPARATIVE
ANALYSIS. Thesis. California State University, Chico, 2012. <http://csuchico-
dspace.calstate.edu/bitstream/handle/10211.4/434/4%2018%202012%20Julia%20Gerhard.pdf?
sequence=1>. 66-71 ZJN)
Before I discuss how writing in all three of these novels serves as the means for the main protagonists to find their inner selves,
recognize themselves as individuals, and thus resist the authority of the state, it needs to be noted that writing
by itself
manifests an act of resistance. Since in a dystopian world individuality is suppressed by ideology
and discipline, and people’s actions and thoughts are constantly policed, writing presents a
serious threat to the state: it renders personal expression, self-reflection, and authority—things
that empower people and prompt them to think critically. Not only does writing invite a foreign thought that
can question and challenge the authority of the State, it also enables that foreign thought to move and spread,
posing a tremendous danger for the government’s stability. Therefore, writing is banned in most dystopian
novels and is considered a crime. Hence, people who decide to take such a risk and engage themselves in some form of writing
already break the law and jeopardize their status as a citizen. The mere act of writing violates the state’s law and thus, in itself,
presents an act of resistance. From the first couple pages of Orwell’s 1984, the reader learns that writing is a serious felony in
Oceania and if “detected it was reasonably certain that it would be punished by death” (Orwell 9). As he begins his diary, Smith
admits that “to mark the paper was the decisive act” and, knowing that it was punishable by death, he realizes that the only thing he
needs is “courage,” as “the actual writing would be easy” (10). If writing by itself incorporates crime, then the content of the writing
does not even matter. As Winston later contends after he writes his brazen “DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER” in his diary, “the writing of
those particular words was not more dangerous than the initial 67 act of opening the diary” (19). Keeping a diary equals
thoughtcrime, “the essential crime that contained all others in itself,” and in consequence crystallizes Winston’s daring act of
opposition to the tyrannical rule of Ingsoc and ideology of the Party (19). Winston’s finding of the corner in his apartment that allows
him to hide from the Panopticon gaze of the telescreen and write his diary symbolizes his attempt to find a way to defy and go
against Party’s dominant regime. As Tyner notes, “the simple act of purchasing and possession of a diary constitutes a punishable
offence and thus may be read as an act of resistance” (144). He, however, contends that Winston’s diary, which is “written within
the spaces of the novel,” reveals a more significant meaning of resistance, because despite the Party’s surveillance, as Smith shows,
diaries do get written—so little acts of revolt are possible in dystopian society. In Atwood’s novel, writing and reading is also banned.
In this dystopian society, women according to their new social functions do not need to read or write since their only purpose is to
produce future generations. Reducing handmaids’ human status to almost zero and denying them any power, even the power over
their own bodies, Gilead also prohibits any forms of reading and writing that might offer these women any kind of agency or remind
them of their other “abilities.” Thus, Offred’s narration embodies a great act of resistance, which by its sheer existence constitutes
opposition and reluctance to accept Gilead’s new ideology. Since language is erased and words on signs are substituted by pictures,
Offred’s story telling where she reconstructs the language definitely can be viewed as a brave act of
resistance. If Winston Smith in 1984 uses an archaic instrument, a pen, and buys an old book to be used as his diary, Offred
cannot even do that: women are completely divorced from any written documents and have no access to books, pens or paper.
Unlike Smith and D-503, Offred
does not write her story; instead, she narrates her “tale” to the tape-
recorder, which is later discovered by future generations. The reason is obvious—writing is
illegal and Offred cannot have paper or pens in her possession: “It’s also a story I’m telling, in my
head, as I go along. Tell, rather than write, because I have nothing to write with and writing is in
any case forbidden” (52). When Offred goes to the market, she observes how paintings eradicated words that were
previously written on the wooden signs of the shops and could still be seen through the paint when “they decided that even the
names of shops were too much temptation” for women (33). Women in Gilead ought not to be tempted by anything except for
fulfilling their duty of bearing children. Later on, Offred confesses that books belong to the black market now and are nowhere to be
found except in the possession of Commanders and the ruling elite. When the Commander invites her to his room, Offred notices
that around the walls there were many bookcases filed with books. She concludes: “Books and books and books, right out in plain
view, no locks, no boxes. No wonder we can’t come in here. It’s an oasis of the forbidden” (177). Thus, if
Commander holds
power, books in his possession also symbolize a power that is not attainable by Handmaids . In a
way, Offred’s narration becomes her book and symbolizes the power she was able to acquire by
composing it. Later on, while playing Scrabble with the Commander, Offred experiences an inconceivable
feeling of freedom that overpowers her, as she continues to hold possession of words that she
composes and acknowledges—she feels as if “he’s offered her drugs” ( 179). In a different scene, when
Commander gives Offred a Vogue magazine, she is shocked to see something that was supposed to have been burnt. She admits
that 69 she wanted it badly “with a force that made the ends of her fingers ache” (200). She further explains: What was in them
[magazines] was promise. They dealt in transformations; they suggested an endless series of possibilities . . .. They suggested one
adventure after another . . .. They suggested rejuvenation, pain overcome and transcended, endless love. (201) In this sense,
magazines represent feelings and thoughts Handmaids are not supposed to have, something humane and spontaneous. Lastly, the
sentence written on the closet wall by the previous Handmaid in Offred’s room—Nolite te bastardes carborundorum— intrigues and
puzzles her because she cannot understand what it means. Offred, however, is constantly communicating with and thinking about
the Handmaid that occupied her room prior to her coming here and admits that it gives her joy to know that her writing, which she
cannot even decipher, was at least read by one other person. She knows it contains an important message, but cannot interpret it.
She ponders: “Why did she write this, why did she bother?” (190). This sentence becomes emblematic in a sense that if it cannot be
decoded, it means that the power lies in the writing itself—in the unknown message it was trying to articulate. It can be argued that
Offred’s narration was inspired by it and becomes the embodiment of the message of this unknown woman, who represents
women in general, oppressed and silenced, who were trying to speak, but could not be heard.
Thus, now it is Offred’s duty to continue the message, to let it reach the unknown audience: You don’t tell a story only to yourself.
There’s always someone else. Even when there is no one. A story is like a letter. Dear You, I’ll say. Just you, without a name . . .. You
can mean more than one. You can mean thousands . . . I’ll pretend you can hear me. (53) 70 By
composing and recording
her story in a society where reading, writing or speaking is prohibited, Offred represents the
voice of the oppressed, and the act of her narration defies the rules of the domineering regime .
As Linda Kauffman points out, in The Handmaid’s Tale, “the medium changes, but the mode remains the same” (222)— Offred
challenges the system by speaking up against it through stealing the language and spreading the
message of the silenced victims, thus making the act of her narrating a rebellion in itself: “Exiled,
imprisoned, cloistered, or ‘shut up,’ epistolary heroines are deeply subversive because for them
writing [or narrating] itself is an act of revolt ” (226). Unlike 1984 and The Handmaid’s Tale, writing is not banned in
Zamyatin’s We, but it has a limited function. The purpose of art and poetry is purely panegyrical in Zamyatin’s dystopia; it has to
eulogize the grandeur and mathematically rational life of One State as well as the infallibility of the Benefector, evident in the poems
like “Mathematical Rhymes,” “Daily Odes to the Benefector,” “Late for Work,” “Flowers of Judicial Verdicts.” As T.R.N. Edwards
claims in his book Three Russian Writers and the Irrational: Zamyatin, Pil`nyak, and Bulgakov, art and writing are “subordinated to
the purpose of propaganda, and serves a utilitarian aim” (69). Indeed, D-503 himself divulges that “poetry today is not some
impudent nightingale’s piping—poetry is government service, poetry is usefulness” (Zamyatin 67). He finds it repulsive that poets in
the past “wrote about whatever popped into their heads,” but ends up doing it himself since the medium he chooses for his writing
suggests self-reflection and self-questioning rather than simple praise (66). As Edwards puts it, “what is intended to be a civic
bequest to the inhabitants of other planets soon turns into an intimate record of D-’s love affair with Iand his growing awareness” of
his self (63). What is interesting is that D-503 is aware of 71 his digression into his emotional world and his deviation from the
original plan to praise and record the infallible perfect life of OneState, and yet he continues to do it. As he mentions himself, he
wants to fit “any absurdity” of his narration into “a syllogism,” but obviously fails to accomplish it, as he regretfully affirms: I am
crushed to see that instead of the elegant and strict mathematical poem in honor of OneState, it’s turning out to be some kind of
fantastic adventure novel. Oh, if only this really were just a novel instead of my actual life, filled with X’s, √ 1, and degradations. (99)
Thus, his continuation to record his feelings instead of composing a paean clearly shows his resistance to the rules of OneState since,
as he himself states, art is not supposed to be personal, but only utilitarian. He ignores his duty as an orthodox dystopian citizen to
pay tribute to the State and its values, and thus subverts the ideology by his writing: “Yes, duties, . . . in my mind I quickly went
through the most recent entries in these pages. The fact that there wasn’t anywhere the least thought of any duty . . . ” (127). D’s
heretical diary not only reveals the irregularities of OneState’s life, but also challenges State’s collective ideology through his newly
discovered individuality: Picture this: a human finger, cut off from its body, its hand . . . a separate human finger, running hopping
alone, all hunched over, on a glass sidewalk. I am that finger. And what is strangest of all, most unnatural of all, is that the finger
hasn’t got the slightest desire to be on the hand, to be with the others . . .. (100)

General Summary + bodily autonomy in the handmaides tale

Gerhard, 2012 (Julia. CONTROL AND RESISTANCE IN THE DYSTOPIAN NOVEL: A COMPARATIVE
ANALYSIS. Thesis. California State University, Chico, 2012. <http://csuchico-
dspace.calstate.edu/bitstream/handle/10211.4/434/4%2018%202012%20Julia%20Gerhard.pdf?
sequence=1>. 61-62 ZJN)
The idea of human beings being exploited and appreciated only when they can accomplish their societal duty and benefit the state is emphasized in
Margaret Atwood’s dystopia The Handmaid’s Tale. In this novel ,
set in the Republic of Gilead during the time when very
few women are able to procreate due to nuclear radiation and chemical pollution, women are
valued only for their bodies that can reproduce and supply the state with children. All people, especially
women, in this new theocratic republic, are divided into classes according to their social functions and have to wear color-coded clothes to be easily
distinguishable.
Women who still have viable ovaries belong to a newly created social class, called
Handmaids, who are assigned to the males of the ruling class elite purely for reproductive
purposes and “are reduced to fertility machines” (Freibert 282). 34 They are selected and trained in indoctrination centers
by Aunts, and, as Roberta Rubenstein points out, are “tattooed with ‘cattle brands’” to embrace their new role and social function as a “two-legged
womb”—their duty now is to bear children (Rubenstein 106; Atwood 128). When the mission is accomplished and the baby is born, the Handmaid can
be relocated to another Commander. Undoubtedly, in this dystopian society, the woman is literally perceived
as a body, a “womb” that can produce offspring to be distributed and utilized in society however
the state desires. In fact, fertile women are considered property of the state: they are assigned
to Commanders and are treated not as human beings, but rather, as proposed by Linda
Kauffman, as a “territory to master,” a reproductive tool that can be beneficial for society’s
stability (226). Linda Myrsiades addresses females’ new social function in Gilead’s society in her essay “Law, Medicine, and the Sex Slave in
Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale” and compares Handmaids to slaves, “reproductive slaves,” who are “forced by the state to bear children and
not entitled to full human status” (228). She asserts that women are stripped of their humanity and, instead of fulfilling their traditional role of
mothers, introduced into their new roles—the role of “surrogate, carrying on society’s genes as the vessel through which they pass” (228). The

utilization of a human body is particularly emphasized in this novel, since it is mainly a woman’s
body that is being controlled and disciplined in Atwood’s dystopia. Women and their inferior
position to men have always occupied a prominent place in the discourse of the body because
they are usually depicted as emotional, irrational, driven by the instincts of their corporeal
needs, and going against the traditional male-dominated beliefs. Moreover, women have
frequently been the subject of 35 masculine control and have been subjugated and manipulated
mostly through their bodies. As stated by Angela King in “The Prisoner of Gender: Foucault and the Disciplining of the Female Body,”
women are usually defined “according to their reproductive physiology,” thus making them “feeble and passive, literally a receptacle for the desires of
the male and incubator for his offspring, . . . a slave to her reproductive organs/hormones” (31). Likewise, in Atwood’s futuristic world, women are only
defined as reproductive tools for the future of the state and reduced to the status of baby-making machines. The leitmotif of a woman’s
body being used solely for procreative purposes permeates the entire novel, and the main
protagonist, Offred, constantly observes, refers and analyses her body as the story progresses.
In the scene following her visit to the doctor, Offred admits while undressing that she does not
want to look down at her body “not so much because it is shameful or immodest, but because”
she does not want “to look at something that determines her so completely” (Atwood 82) . She
realizes that as long as she keeps birthing babies, she will be safe; otherwise, she will be proclaimed

an “unwoman” and sent to the colonies to do hard manual work. The state does not offer women a variety of
options, so they just follow along to avoid any repercussions and possibly death. Later in the novel, when Offred ponders over the past where she had a
normal life with a husband and a daughter, she
confesses that she used to view her body as “an instrument of
pleasure, or a means of transportation, or an implement for the accomplishment of her will”—
something alive, “lithe, single, solid, one with her” (95). However, now, since she has been
reduced to a child-bearing apparatus, “an ambulatory chalice,” her body, as Rubenstein puts it,
“exists literally to be used against her” (103). 36 She feels how her flesh “arranges itself
differently” and perceives herself as a cloud, “congealed around a central object, the shape of a
pear” with a space inside that is “huge,” “dark,” and “empty” (Atwood 95). She feels that her
body does not belong to her anymore; it is now the state’s valuable asset, or, as Offred puts it
herself, its “national resource” and, thus, the state decides when and how her body is going to
be used (Atwood 85). Myrsiades states that Offred as a person ceases to exist (even her new given name seems to imply it—being Of Fred,
the name of her Commander, or “offered”) because “she has been inverted and engulfed in the dissipating egg her womb expels, provoking an image of
an incubator housed in that which it incubates” (227). Clearly, the
governmental control reaches its highest goal: it has
stolen a body, thousands of bodies to be exact—the most private part of a human being—
robbing people of their humanity, freedom of choice and inner power, reducing them to apathy
and servility, and, as expressed by Freibert, “violating their individual autonomy” (283). In the case
of Offred, her body has not just become “docile”; it is completely absent and gone.
Consequently, Myrsiades proclaims Offred to be “an absented figure,” who is “unrepresented”
and “erased” (223). Establishing constant control over one’s body proves to be a very effective
way for the ruling class to keep the citizens in a submissive state and always working. When the bodies
relentlessly remain exhausted and busy with activity, there is no time or desire for the mind to be active, since, when the body is drained and feeble, it
needs to regain its energy by being physically and mentally inert. Nevertheless, some people manage to stay mentally active and alert, able to see all
the gaps and cracks in the political and socio-economic systems and unveil the state’s conniving master plan. Thus, this leads to the expansion of the
governmental control of the body to the control of the mind so that any misdemeanor or rebelling thought could be eliminated and the state could
have a total dominion over the human being: from the tips of their toes to the insides of their brains. In
addition, to ensure that
bodies contribute to the economic wellbeing of the state and are utilized to their full potential,
they need to be indoctrinated and sincerely believe in their actions. This is where ideology plays
an enormous role in making humans accept their social functions and becomes a powerful tool
in manipulating and controlling human minds. Thus, ideology turns people into slaves who will obey and do whatever the
government assigns to them, disregarding their own personal ambitions. As Althuseer contends, ideology “endows” every “subject” with a
“consciousness” and “ideas” that his “consciousness inspires in him” and thus, forces him to “act according to his ideas,” gratifying wholly the secret
agenda of the government (157). This is where the control of the body and mind as two separate branches of discipline have to be employed jointly for
the ultimate effect of total human submission to the state’s Machine: in order for people to act in a certain way, they have to actually believe in the
ethicality of their actions.

Reclaiming Agency through writing

Gerhard, 2012 (Julia. CONTROL AND RESISTANCE IN THE DYSTOPIAN NOVEL: A COMPARATIVE
ANALYSIS. Thesis. California State University, Chico, 2012. <http://csuchico-
dspace.calstate.edu/bitstream/handle/10211.4/434/4%2018%202012%20Julia%20Gerhard.pdf?
sequence=1>. 33-37 ZJN)
Writing or, to be exact, narrating in Margaret Atwood’s dystopia The Handmaid’s Tale also plays a central
role as the main protagonist’s way of resistance to the theocratic regime of the Republic of
Gilead, where women are exclusively valued for their reproductive function and are mentally
and physically abused by the patriarchal ruling class . While, in Zamyatin’s and Orwell’s dystopias, writing helps the main characters to
discover their individuality and reconnect with the past, in Atwood’s futuristic world, Offred, the main heroine, employs writing to

reconstruct her body, which has been disciplined and exploited for the state’s benefit. As Foucault puts
it, the discipline that the state employs to achieve its supremacy has to dominate and control the

body to achieve its total subjection: “the discipline increases the forces of the body (in economic terms of utility) and diminishes these same forces
(in political terms of obedience)” (138). Thus, she has to regain her body and reclaim her authority, recreate her

identity and challenge the state’s ideals by narrating her story . Among the dystopian novels discussed in this chapter,
Atwood’s novel literally belongs to the tradition of écriture féminine and directly reflects the philosophies of the feminist writers on the role of women and their oppression in

women in Gilead are defined only through their social functions of procreation, are
society. Since

treated as “fertility machines,” and have no power over the autonomy of their own bodies, the
only way to survive and resist the repression is to attempt to regain their bodies (Freibert 282). Writing,
subsequently, becomes the avenue for the reconstruction and liberation of the woman’s body,
which has been taken away from her, rendering her voiceless and powerless . As Cixous underlines in her essay
“The Laugh of the Medusa,” writing enables woman to “return to the body which has been more than

confiscated from her, which has been turned into the uncanny stranger on display” (395). Since
the woman “is reduced to being the servant of the militant male, his shadow,” she has to rebel
and let her body be heard through writing,— “an act which will not only ‘realize’ the decensored
relation of woman to her sexuality, to her womanly being,” but also “give her back her goods, her pleasures,
her organs, her immense bodily territories which have been kept under seal.” Narrating her own story thus
becomes essential for Offred, because through writing she recreates her body, reconstructs her identity, and remains human. As I discussed in the previous chapter,

Offred, the main protagonist in The Handmaid’s Tale, always refers to her body as something
over which she does not have control anymore, something that is foreign or distant from her,
something that is needed by the governing elite and thus treated as their property. In the Republic of
Gilead, where as a result of the military coup, religious fundamentalists obtain governmental power, women who can still reproduce become a “national resource,” as nuclear
pollution has rendered most women infertile (Atwood 85). Her role now is to give birth, and, if she is unable to accomplish it, she will be labeled an “unwoman” and sent to the
Colonies to toil laboriously until she dies. Aunts indoctrinate Handmaids to think of themselves as “seeds,” but Offred refuses to be considered just a seed: she feels that as a
human being she is entitled to have the 93 ownership over her own body and her self (25). Thus, since she is denied the ownership of her body, she must reclaim it through her
story. As Sheila Conboy assures in her article “Scripted, Conscripted, and Circumcised,” Offred “refigures” her lost body “through the text, as she imagines the narrative as a
metaphorical body” (356). The leitmotif of the dismembered body is vividly present in this novel and becomes the metaphor for Offred’s lost body to the ruthless values of
Gilead, one she must reconstruct through her story. Images of and references to body parts can be detected throughout the whole novel (Rubenstein 104). In this dystopia,
handmaids are only viewed as “two legged wombs” (176); the doctor who examines Offred “deals with a torso only” (78); the image of hands reoccurs multiple times when
Offred thinks how “empty” they seem to her, as they “could be held, but not seen” (Atwood 62; Rubenstein 104). When Offred has memories of her husband, Luke, she
confesses that she feels like a “missing person” and expresses the incredible urge to hold a human body: Can I be blamed for wanting a real body, to put my arms around?
Without it I too am disembodied. I can listen to my own heartbeat against the bedsprings, I can stroke myself, under the dry white sheets, in the dark, but I too am dry and
white, hard, granular; it’s like running my hand over a plateful of dried rice; it’s like snow. There’s something dead about it, something deserted. (132) When women all of a
sudden become powerless over night as a result of the military coup that establishes the rule of the Judeo-Christian theocracy in Gilead, Offred recalls that she thought as if
somebody had “cut off [her] feet” (Atwood 232; Rubenstein 105). Interestingly enough, Offred’s friend Moira, the one who tries to escape from the Aunts’ controlling discipline
and indoctrination, is punished mercilessly, and it is her feet that are tortured “with steel cables, frayed at the ends” since, as Aunt Lydia puts it, “for our purposes your feet and

the propaganda 94 movies that Aunts show to the Handmaids,

your hands are not essential” (118). Finally,

underscoring how women have been mistreated in the past, contain dead and mutilated bodies
and once even show a woman “being slowly cut into pieces, her fingers and breasts snipped off
with garden shears, her stomach slit open and her intestines pulled out” (152). All these images of
the dismembering woman’s body symbolize and highlight Offred’s and other women’s loss of
any authority over their bodies and become the metaphors of their shattered selves. Thus, Offred must
revive her mutilated body through her narration, in which she recreates her identity, gains agency, and puts together the pieces of her dismembered body. This symbolism of
disembodiment is analyzed by Roberta Rubenstein, who asserts that Offred’s text becomes “an act of self-generation that opposes the oppressive obligations of procreation”
and also functions as Offred’s struggle “to reconstruct her fragmented selfhood and to justify the choices she has made” (105). Conboy also discusses this theme in her article
and states that Offred’s “textual body, ‘this sad and hungry and sordid, this limpid and mutilating story,’ replicates the narrator’s literal body, which is cut off from her free mind:

Offred’s story serves as

both body and text are experienced as parts which do not always cohere, as shattered wholes” (Atwood 267-268; Conboy 356). Thus,

means to glue the pieces of her dismembered body and her shattered self together. Another critic, Debrah
Raschke, examines this idea as well in her work “Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale: False Borders and Subtle Subversions” and illustrates how Handmaids’ names
resonate with their distorted bodies and selves. She explains that the newly created class of Handmaids is distinguished not only by their redcolored dresses and white wings of
their hats, but also by their new names, which are “formed by a preposition and its object”—Offred—meaning of Fred, Fred’s possession 95 that “mark them not only as claimed
property, but as nonsubjects” (259). She rightly suggests: “Through the exclusive use of the preposition and its object, the ‘I’ and the connecting verb in this syntactical
construction become eliminated entirely. By saying ‘Of Fred’ instead of ‘I am of Fred,’ the subject (of the sentence) is effaced, thus diminishing the chances of a Handmaid

etaphorically, the Handmaids, unable

constructing herself as an ‘I’ (as a subject or a self). Total erasure” (259). Therefore, she concludes that “m

to tell their own stories, are ‘blank pages,’ untold stories—women’s histories, cultures, and
writing that have been edited out of the dominant culture or reformulated to fit the masculine
mode” (259). Because their selves are taken from them and even their names are changed and mutilated, they are voiceless and powerless, and thus now must reclaim
their authority and narrate their own story, where they can recreate their identity, the one that has been “edited out” to fit the dominant culture. Another way that writing or
authorship functions in this novel is it provides the main protagonist with a space of her own since she literally does not exist in this dystopian society as a person—only as a
child-bearing machine—or, as Raschke puts it, “a baby maker, procreator, womb vessel” (259). Consequently, writing grants Offred an opportunity to express and repossess her
self as a human being, and explore her identity as a person—not simply an “ambulatory chalice” (176). The idea of a body being a woman’s “dwelling place” is introduced and
explored by a feminist writer Nancy Mairs in her essay “Reading Houses, Writing Lives: The French Connection,” where she claims that woman by embracing her body will find
her own private space in society. Mirroring Cixous’ idea of the body, Mairs affirms: 96 Still forced to function as man’s Other and thus, alienated from her self, she has not been
able to live in her ‘own’ house, her very body . . . Women haven’t had eyes for themselves. They haven’t gone exploring in their house . . . Their bodies, which they haven’t dared
enjoy, have been colonized. (412) Hence, she determines that writing becomes woman’s living space, and “through writing her body, a woman may reclaim the deed to her
dwelling” (412). The erasure of women—which Raschke and Mysriades talk about—and thus their “inexistence” with no space of their own is evident in Gilead from not only the
way women are treated by the government and Commanders, but also by the way they live. After the military upheaval, women are stripped off their jobs and bank accounts,
their old clothes and names, their right to love and be with who they want, even the right to read and be educated, and thus, as Ginette Katz-Roy puts it, “they became
anonymous workers in a society organized like a gigantic bee-hive or ant-hill” (119). Their invisibility is also underscored by their new dress code: a long red dress that hides the
figure, red gloves and shoes—everything is red—“the color of blood, which defines them”; the only thing that is white is the hat that has wings on the sides, “which keep them
from seeing, but also from being seen” (Atwood 11). As Aunt Lydia preaches to them, “to be seen is to be penetrated. What you must be girls is impenetrable” (38). Offred
resides in a small room with no windows or mirrors at the Commander’s house, which is a compound with gates all around for protection, like a “prison” (Katz-Roy 119). Offred
admits: “Now and again we vary the route; there is nothing against it, as long as we stay within barriers. A rat in a maze is free to go anywhere, as long as it stays within the
maze” (53). The old gymnasium where the Handmaids undergo their “education” is always surveilled by the Aunts; they are constantly in view and have no privacy, or, as
Virginia Woolf puts it, no “room” of their 97 own. Once Offred is assigned to the Commander and comes to live with him and his wife, she refuses to call the room “hers” as if
she knows that once she acknowledges it, she accepts the rules of this game and succumbs to the regime’s power. Thus, Offred finds that room of her own through writing or to
be exact narrating (since writing is not allowed there, she narrates her tale on the tape-recorder), enabling her to become visible, gain self-autonomy and become human again.
Since she is completely voiceless and powerless in this society, she claims her voice and her body back by composing her story. As Coral Ann Howells points out in her book

Offred refuses to be silenced, as she speaks out with the voice of late twentieth-
Margaret Atwood, “

century feminist individualism, resisting the cultural identity imposed on her” (99). Linda Myrsiades also justly
proposes that Offred, “deprived of the ‘room’ that was her own, . . . must create a space she can claim as hers, a storied place that allows her to possess her whole self” (230).

Offred’s composition “yields her an emergent ‘place’ of her own,” as she “owns both
Thus,

intellectual and property rights over that which she composes” (234). Offred claims power over
her own body, the one that has been, as Foucault puts it, “manipulated, shaped, trained” by the state,
and her composing becomes something that she can control: “I would like to believe this is a
story I’m telling. I need to believe it . . .. If it’s a story I’m telling, then I have control over the
ending. Then there will be an ending, to the story, and real life will come after it” (Foucault 136; Atwood 52).
Offred’s authorship becomes a very empowering and emancipating means to regain her body and identity as she recomposes and reconstructs her story. Since writing enables
one to invent one’s language to resist the repression from the domineering culture, and, as Althusser maintains, break through the “ruling ideology,” it allows one to 98 also
recreate and even change the reality because reality is expressed and perceived through language (139). Cixous comments on women’s writing and the new language they have
to embrace: “Women must write through their bodies, they must invent the impregnable language that will wreck partitions, classes and rhetorics, regulations and codes, they
must submerge, cut through, get beyond the ultimate reserve-discourse” (399). Offred certainly gains agency through language that she recreates with her narration, since
writing and reading is banned in Gilead: even public signs are replaced by symbols and pictures: Loaves and Fishes is fishmonger’s—“a wooden sign” with “a fish with a smile and
eyelashes” (Atwood 212), All Flesh—a pictorial representation for the butcher’s shop, Milk and Honey—a wooden sign with “three eggs, a bee and a cow” (Katz-Roy 126;

Atwood 34). Thus, Offred’s text symbolizes the rebellion against the erasure of the language and
women’s deprivation of literacy and education. Obviously, language means power, but unlike its manipulation in
1984, in Gilead, language is completely ignored and forgotten—women are forbidden to read even

the signs at the supermarket. Thus, as Katz-Roy contends, Offred’s narration becomes “a confessional sort of writing or story-telling which rehabilitates
the female body as the origin of an alternative type of discourse” (128). In her narration, Offred does not only reflect on her past

and her feelings, but also defines and re-defines a lot of words and meanings, thus, holding the
language in her power and gaining authority. As Cixous emphasizes, feminine type of writing is highly stylized, “never simple or linear”
because the feminine writer “doesn’t deny her drives”—“she lays herself bare” (396). What Cixous advocates is a practice of writing that by “sweeping away syntax” (399)
“becomes utterly destructive,” “volcanic,” capable 99 of cutting through and subverting the official discourse (401). Consequently, she concludes that this “new insurgent
writing” (395) grants one freedom from the repression of the domineering ideology: . . . it will always surpass the discourse that regulates the phallocentric system; it does and
will take place in areas other than those subordinated to philosophicotheoretical domination. It will be conceived of only by subjects who are breakers of automatisms, by
peripheral figures that no authority can ever subjugate. (397) If we look at Offred’s writing, it becomes apparent that it does fall into the category of the “new insurgent writing”
that Cixous is promoting. Offred narrates in a circular manner often offering plurality of meanings to many words, sometimes even contradicting and doubting herself. For
example, this is how she defines the word “chair”: “I sit in the chair and think about the word chair. It can also mean the leader of a meeting. It can also be a mode of execution.
It is the first syllable in charity. It is the French word for flesh; none of these facts has any connection with the others” (Atwood 140). In this handling of multiple various
connotations that she once learnt, Offred obtains power and gains authority through authorship that comes from freedom to experiment with language and break through the
conventional definitions and labels. This power is also provided to her when the Commander suddenly invites her to his study and offers to play Scrabble. She derives an
incredible pleasure in playing the game, and, as Katz-Roy points out, among the words she composes are “larynx” and “gorge”—“organs associated with the production of
sounds,” which stand for her desire to speak up and be heard (129). She even finds a word that the Commander does not know, such as “zilch,” which gives her a sense of
empowerment over him. As Conboy maintains, the Scrabble game 100 represents in miniature the narrator’s text: she employs many words which reflect her bodily restrictions
or desires (larynx, zygote, limp…); then she liberates herself as she shapes and tastes the words that she can substitute for those that have been out in her mouth (‘Blessed be
the fruit’. . .). (356) As Offred confesses, “I want to steal something,” she accomplishes it in stealing and recreating the language, and gaining control over her narrative: I would
like to steal something from this room. I would like to take some small thing, the scrolled ashtray, the little silver pillbox from the mantel perhaps . . . hide it in the folds of my

Thus, her narration

dress or in my zippered sleeve . . .. Every once in a while I would take it out and look at it. It would make me feel that I have power. (103)

becomes something she could hide and keep for her own use, something of her own that gives
her power. Another aspect of her composing that resembles the kind of writing Cixous is endorsing is manifested in Offred’s frequent manipulation of her own story:
she provides three different descriptions of her date with Nick, three accounts of Luke’s departure and often doubts her own words and descriptions (Katz-Roy 130). By giving
various options through her narration, Offred offers some sort of freedom of interpretation and outcome that grants her authority and power to control. Therefore, the
language that she creates in her narrative empowers Offred to break through the conventions of Gilead, resist its rules and regulations, and get her body back by recomposing it
through her story. As Conboy asserts: “Offred makes the body her book—one which she both reads and writes in a new mode” (Conboy 355). Indeed, when she narrates her

All in all, being under the

story, she rewrites and reinvents her self: “My self is a thing I must now compose, as one composes a speech” (Atwood 86).

tremendous control and surveillance that the state employs to discipline its people and their
bodies, dystopian citizens seek resistance through writing that grants them authority, new
identity and power. Writing becomes an 101 essential part of survival under oppressive rule, as
it not only allows people to express themselves and find their individuality, but also endows
them with voice and agency that liberates them from the Party’s dogma and grants them self-
autonomy in these suppressive conditions. As Anzaldúa assures, women, or anyone subjugated by the dominant culture or authority,
should “write to record what others erase,” “to become more intimate” and “preserve” oneself because “the act of writing is the act of making soul, . . . the quest for the self”
(319). As a consequence, in a dystopian novel, where the concept of individuality is vanishing—personal life merges with the social, human body and mind are appropriated
according to the communal needs of the state—writing becomes an imperative mode to free oneself from the collective ideology and gain personal independence, discover
one’s true identity and recreate one’s own body and mind. When people’s body and mind are constantly manipulated and exploited, narration or writing becomes a vital agency
that can put the pieces of their mutilated bodies and tortured minds together and offer them a space for recreation, remembering and reconstruction of the self. Whether
writing allows dystopian citizens to see themselves as individuals with their own personal feelings and ambitions (We), or enables them to reconnect with their past and regain
their memories (1984), or permits them to reconstruct their bodies (The Handmaid’s Tale), it grants them a sense of authority and identity and presents them with an
opportunity for revival and rebirth.

Female’s as disciplined bodies

The Handmaid’s Tale – The Female Body as a Site of Resistance

Julia Pei-Hsuan Hsieh

That women’s bodies such as Handmaids’ are severely scrutinized has explained how a body can
be docile, especially the female body. As Michel Foucault introduces how he sees the human bodies are those
accustomed to being disciplined and regarded as docile ones in his Discipline and Punish, human bodies become docile
so as to reach the controlling power’s goal of order and regulation. For him, human body was
directed and disciplined since birth ; ideologies such as sexuality and gender are produced by discourses. This
discipline not merely “produces subjected and practiced bodies, ‘docile’ bodies” (138) but also
becomes an aptitude, a capacity that dissociates power from the body . That is, the energy of the
body is controlled, disciplined and developed and later is reversed to be a restraint, a power of
subjection. Additionally, this control takes place in body, in space and morality, which is an ideological control. Apparatus such
as schools, military institutions, industrial organization, or a control 3 measure dealing with outbreak of certain epidemic diseases all
demonstrate the impact of the power of the control over the body that is docile. In her “Introduction to the Female,” Jared Fox
interprets how she perceives Foucault’s defining a docile body as one body that can be subjected, used, transformed and improved
so as to achieve demands of disciplinary actions (1). She further endorses her reading of Sandra Lee Bartky who criticizes our
society that has made the female body the particularly disciplined and docile one. Hence, with
Foucault’s concept of the docile body that is made to be both useful and intelligible, in this chapter, I will present my discussion in
three sections: in the first section, I will examine Gilead’s
control over all the women and especially the
handmaids, focusing on the site of the female body. Gilead’s disciplinary technologies include:
the way they categorize the female bodies, define women’s roles in a household as such that of
the Commanders’ households, constrain and put under surveillance women’s movements,
knowledge, language and even thinking. All of these are done to make the female body useful
and intelligible. Then in the second section, I will move to analyze the bodily consciousness awakened by body and food
imagery, which later awakens Offred to resist Gileadean control. I will argue how Offred, though seriously deprived
and restricted, retains her bodily consciousness through an analysis of the body and food
imagery used in her narration. And finally, I will examine Offred’s stronger and stronger resistance
against the totalitarian and how she retains her individual consciousness and subjectivity
through memory, bodily functions and acts, and, finally, self-narration.

Construction of the female body in the handmaids tale

The Handmaid’s Tale – The Female Body as a Site of Resistance

Julia Pei-Hsuan Hsieh

-national property

-assigned color

- separation via class etc.

- Surveillance as a method of discipline

The female body in The Handmaid’s Tale is considered the national property. This could be seen through certain
functions of different female bodies in a hierarchical society like Gilead . For women of different levels, the Gilead government

appoints colored dresses for them. There are seven categories of women dressed in different colors: the Wives dressed in blue, and always seen in
cars, but not on the sidewalks; the Aunts dressed in khaki with electronic cattle prod on their leather belts ; the Handmaid in red, as Offred

describes, “Everything except the wings around my face is red: the color of blood, which defines
us” (8); the Marthas in dull green, functioning as cooks; the Econowives in the striped dresses composed of the color red, blue and green, and among them, the Widows
dressed in all black; the Unwoman, who are to be starved to death or catch unknown diseases in the Colonies, are in gray overall. 4 Besides being

categorized by colors, women are treated as national property in terms of their function – as
rewards and prize for men, the leading characters of Gilead. Fertile women, for instance, are made the Handmaids as prize
objects sent to the Commanders’ households. Once the Handmaids are done with giving birth to a household, she is to be redistributed to another household. As Offred recalls

She
in her narration, “I wait, washed, brushed, fed, like a prize pig. Sometime in the eighties they invented pig balls, for pigs who were being fattened in pens” (69).

thinks of herself as objectified as a prize big when she is all alone in her room and can not do
anything but what she is asked to do: to be bathed, to be fed and to wait for further demands
from the head of the family or society. She is an example of how men in power, such as the Commanders and the Angels, are rewarded by fertile
women. Likewise, the Virgins become brides to the Angels. The underground prostitutes are another example of women’s being prizes, which are used to reward and entertain

When speaking about spatial constraint, in addition, only by taking turns

Commanders and their foreign customers.

in being sick and remaining in bed do the Wives get the chance of going out and visiting each
other. However restrained the Wives are, Offred realizes the women from the lower status are
even much more exploited and controlled. In the similar way, she notices that Marthas are confined in the household as well. She feels that
Marthas are involved in their endless household chores in the kitchen and the compound. Offred knows that she is both the hope of them and the target of envy because she is

allowed to get around running errands. Worst of all, the Unwoman exposed in the contaminated environment are
silenced in the real life and in the documentary. Being segregated from society, the Unwoman
only appear in documentary and in the Handmaids’s nightmares. They are victimized in the
Colonies, cleaning the waste and suffering from torment that later end them in the misery of
mysterious illness. As national property, women’s bodies are expected to be useful and totally controllable by the men in power. To be more effective,
Gilead authorizes some unfertile women, the Aunts, as a deputy of the central controlling power
so as to reaffirm that all women are under surveillance both ideologically and physically . Any rebellious
female bodies are to be punished and re-educated until they have become bodies that follow the order . To achieve the total surveillance, first

Handmaids are sieved out, disciplined and brainwashed with all the doctrines. Moira, the distinctly rebellious
woman, is to be punished due to her uncooperative behavior; when the Aunts realizes that she may remain her position as a backlash against Gilead society, they send her to
Jezebel’s, the underground night club which offers Commanders and powerful figures of the country amusement such as sex service. In addition to being identified in terms of
the one role determined by the nation and 5 matched with one corresponding color, the women in Gilead, like the men there, are disciplined and organized spatially in Gilead.

First of all, wherever they walk, they are under the surveillance of the Eyes. In the heart of Gilead,
there are posts everywhere with Guardians and machines like the Compuchek to control and
supervise everyone; no one is allowed to move freely in the city without passes . While closing schools,
churches and libraries, the national machine provides the ‘wall,’ the dead bodies as “zeroes” on the wall, as well as the ceremony of public execution, as a means of education
and a warning sign against any possible violation of rules and disloyalty. Under such strict surveillance of the Gileadeans’ bodily actions, Offred is afraid of being caught at her

secret rebellion such as her quiet communication with Ofglen. The spatial control in Gilead is an extreme form of what Foucault calls a
“carceral texture of society [with its] capture of the body and its perpetual observation ” (304). The
existence of the wall, like the prison in Foucault’s analysis, justifies society’s disciplinary technologies and carceral forms. Situated in this carceral

texture and having their bodies controlled both spatially and physically, the female bodies,
whether they be those of the Wifes, the Marthas’ or Moira’s and Offred’s, are by all means
docile. With a closer look on the life of the Marthas and the Wife in her Commander’s compound, Offred notices that most conformed women devot their energy and
bodies to domestic affairs. Even though they are given limited power, the Wives seem to be engaged in endless sewing, knitting and quilting for the frontier Angels. The quiet
knitting image of a mother further brings Offred to retrospect on Serena Joy’s eloquence in the old time and her silence at the present of Gilead. Offred recalls the old days when
she used to see Serena Joy preaching the fundamental doctrines in a theatrical way on television: She wasn’t singing anymore by then, she was making speeches. She was good
at it. Her speeches were about the sanctity of the home, about how women should stay home. Serena Joy didn’t do this herself, she made speeches instead, but she presented
this failure of hers as a sacrifice she was making for the good of all. (45) Here Offred demonstrates her resistance through her observation and critical thinking, and through her
sarcasm over Serena’s former life and current situation, she becomes powerful with her sharp awareness of control and her critical thinking and memory. Offred recalls the past
when she watches Serena (whose real name, Offred believes, was Pam) make hysterical speeches with tears and heavy makeup wearing off with the tears, Offred feels
frightened with Serena’s earnest and enthusiasm. Then she considers Serena’s silence to be a powerless protest compared to her eloquence in the pre-Gilead society: “She
doesn’t make speeches anymore. She has become speechless. She stays in her home, but it doesn’t seem to agree with her. How furious she must be, now that she’s been taken
at her word” (46). 6 If the Wives’ and Marthas’ bodies are framed within the household, Moira’s is used secretly in a space beyond disciplinary boundaries and hidden in one
corner of Gilead, Jezebel’s, where women’s sexuality is stressed and instrumentalized for sexual entertainment. In the second half of the novel, Offred discovers that the female

Gilead society
body is manipulated and decorated with an emphasis on femininity under severe control. It is not until the night in Jezebel’s does Offred realize that

not only manipulates the female body like the pre-Gilead society, but also further exploits the
female body with extreme stress on female sexuality —even though the Aunts tell them that they are well protected from the crimes
connected to sexual liberations. As a “rent-out” at the night in Jezebel’s, Offred sees her friend Moira, dressed in the costume of a typical playmate: the bunny suit, which
stresses on the figurative shape of the female body. Through Moira, Offred is told about her mother being exploited in the Colony and the life of the women in Jezebel’s. It is
what Moira has told her that makes her reflect on how much the female body is being exploited: the useless female body are treated as dirt and are exposed in a poisonous
environment as a guinea pig, whereas the rebellious but still useful female bodies like Moira’s have productive ovaries taken away from them so as to make their bodies become
the source of pleasure and enjoyment for foreigners, guests of the state and the powerful figures in Gilead. In the Jezebel’s, Moira tells Offred what she feels about her body:
“Well, shit, nobody but a nun would pick the Colonies. I mean, I’m not a martyr. If I’d had my tubes tied years ago, I wouldn’t even have needed the operation. Nobody in here
with viable ovaries either, you can see what kind of problems it would cause” (249). Moira’s nonchalant and cynical attitude toward where she is and how she is treated puzzles
and makes Offred feel sad about the changed attitude of Moira, who used to give Offred a string of hope, the hope to get over all the plight. Offred recalls that she is frightened
at hearing the indifference in Moira’s voice, “a lack of volition:” Have they really done it to her then, taken away something – what? – that used to be so central to her? And how
can I expect her to go on, with my idea of her courage, live it through, act it out, when I myself do not? I don’t want her to be like me. Give in, go along, save her skin. That is
what it comes down to. I want gallantry from her, swashbuckling, heroism, single-handed combat. Something I lack. (249) It is also this hope and courage of Moira that supports
Offred to rebel one way or another against all sorts of confinement and restrictions secretly up to the point. Yet, Moira’s indifferent attitude, suggesting her failure and self-
resignation, makes Offred even more desperate at finding a way out. Ironically, Offred wants to be “off-red,” wants to reclaim her identity and subjectivity whereas Moira has
transformed to be a conditioned Jezebel that cannot be off the label nor be herself any more. 7 Realizing her aloneness in the battlefield fight for her way out, Offred gradually
finds herself chances to execute her resistance to actively break through her constraint. Another, and, of course, stronger, stimulus for Offred to resist, is Gilead’s control over

Handmaid’s bodies, including her own. To begin with, the Handmaids in the Red Center are completely under the control
of Aunts. They receive the doctrines defined by the Christian fundamentalism and are stocked with biblical teachings in their brains. Here I use two examples to explain
how the Handmaids’ bodies are docile and made useful in an extreme way. For one thing, the Handmaids’ bodies are confined spatially

and physically. As all Handmaids are the objects under surveillance, their movements and bodies
are the target of the other spectators, including men and women. Not simply are they the target of the tourists, but they
are the perfect aims of the Wives and all the others in the Prayvaganza. In face with the limited freedom, she also tries to adapt herself to it, for she knows that “A rat in a maze
is free to go anywhere, as long as it stays inside the maze” (165). To sum up, there is no privacy for the handmaids, and the obligation that the doctors examine the Handmaids’
bodies serves as another example. In public spaces or private spaces like the doctor’s office, the Handmaids’ red habits mark them differently from other female bodies. After
being examined over as a thing, the Handmaids’s bodies are materialized eventually. Under the Aunts’ teachings, Offred reminds herself of treating her own body as various
items and objects. Offred sees her body as a vessel, just as Aunt Lydia coaches the Handmaids to intake proper food and supplement for the sake of their bodies, which can be
taken as a container, because “it’s only the insides of our bodies that are important” (96); or as a pearl, seeds or house chore that the Martha must tend to. Apart from physical
constraint and surveillance, Handmaids are under severe ideological control, and their bodies are strictly disciplined in order to be kept “useful.” For instance, the concept of
“the body” that is enjoyable in the past has become an object of instruction. In Testifying, Janine tells her gang-raped experience and is accused of being a seductive body: But
whose fault was it? Aunt Helena says, holding up one plump finger. Her fault, her fault, her fault, we chant in unison. Who led them on? Aunt Helena beams, pleased with us.
She did. She did. She did. Why did God allow such a terrible thing to happen? Teach her a lesson. Teach her a lesson. Teach her a lesson. (72) This testifying experience
exemplifies how Janine’s bodily experience of rape is turned into a lesson for her as well as the collective body of the Handmaids: our contemporary idea of “blame it on the
rape victims” here becomes a doctrine to 8 ensure that the Handmaids’ bodies are deprived of all the signs of sexuality--which attract their own attention on their bodies as well
as the rapists’ --so as to be bodies “purely” for reproduction. Another disciplinary technology used to stop the Handmaids from having sexual desire is, ironically, in the use of
pornographic films. To start with, to prove that the female body is more privileged in Gilead society, the Aunts demonstrate how the female body is manipulated during the pre-
Gilead time. Various female body parts are shown as a cruel proof of how women’s bodies are abused and insulted. Nevertheless, the porno film that the Aunts use is just an

extreme measure for them to brainwash the Handmaids and justify their overall control in the totalitarian. The Aunts argue that Gilead society
makes the female body useful with their intelligible traits. The irony is, even though the Aunts put emphasis on the abuse of the
female body in the old time, it is exactly the Aunts that carry out the punishment on the rebellious women through

discipline and physical punishment on the their bodie s. And the tortures on the Handmaids’ bodies are not at all less abusive than
what is shown in the film. Offred recalls the time after Moira was snatched back to the Red Center from her first escape, her feet were beaten swollen by the steel cables: “It
was the feet they’d do, for a first offense. [ ] After that the hands. They didn’t care what they did
to your feet or your hands, even if it was permanent” (92). While the “discipline and
punishment” used is partly for the Handmaids to be “useful” receptacle of sperms, it is also to
turn their images to be easily intelligible and manipulable images of femininity . In many ways, the
Handmaids are taught and conditioned ideologically to retain their femininity . At Gilead, femininity is
constructed as the female image of self-restraint, purity and submissiveness. In the Red Center, Offred learns from Aunt Lydia who reminds all the Handmaids, “The Republic of
Gilead knows no bound. Gilead is within you” (23). This powerful statement indicates how much Offred and other Handmaids internalize the teaching and behave in accordance
with other’s expectation, for they are forced to remember: “The posture of the body is important, here and now: minor discomforts are instructive” (79). Besides having decent
and self-erasing physical movements, the Handmaids are also supposed to restrain themselves in eating. Apparently, all the Handmaids are on a regime of diet; they are not
allowed to take coffee, cigarette and anything in excess. In other words, they exist because their bodies are usable and useful, and the Gilead society does not allow them to
corrupt their bodies with anything. Although the Handmaids seem to have a bit more freedom in going around, they have literally no freedom in aspects ranging from diet to

Offred is accustomed to the Martha’s waiting on

thinking. One obvious piece of evidence is that the Handmaids’ diet is severely planned.

her when it comes to food and bath. As a “prize pig” or “a thing,” her body is also expected to
remain slender so as to remain in their working position. Moreover, one look on handmaids’ greetings, we see that the mind-and-
body-control is externalized and practiced in their language to ensure that they focus on their function of procreation and conform to the image of feminine self-restraint-and-

. Their awareness of being watched everywhere they go is reinforced in the farewell they bid
denial

each other: "Under His Eye." All salutes and sayings are related to the sexual functions of the
handmaids’ bodies, and this can also be seen in their greetings – “Blessed be the fruit;” “May
the God open” (19); “Think of yourself as seeds.” Likewise, images with reproduction are
everywhere so as to do with their abstinence in both appearance, sex and foods – “Modesty is
invisibility” (28), “Waste not, want not” (7). Besides lessons in the forms of praises and
confirmation, warnings are also given to the Handmaids to warn them against men. The Handmaids are
told that “All Flesh is weak,” that men could be tempted just as they themselves could be used as “sex machines.” After all, as the Aunts remind the Handmaids, none of the

the female body has somehow been instrumentalized and reduced as

body parts is as essential as their wombs; and as

a reproductive machine, so does the sexual desire can be seen as redundant and unnecessary .
These teachings and sayings, in a word, impose on the handmaids’ mind and body two ideas: to keep low-profiled, because “to be seen is to be penetrated” and they are
expected to be “impenetrable” (28), and to keep focused on their bodies’ main function of procreation for the state. Made, or forced to be, useful as well as completely

. Since the re-education session in the Red Center, the

intelligible, the Handmaid’s bodies, furthermore, is turned into one body

Handmaids are taught to reverse views toward the female body as a body/product of “freedom
to” to one body of “freedom from”; in other words, from liberated bodies back to restrained
bodies. The Aunts lay stress on women’s bodies as one unison body that is the property of the nation and one body that is to be given freedom from, instead of a body
that is free to do anything. This unison body appears here and there in the story: in the ceremony, Offred’s body only has a meaning when her reproductive system is considered
as Serena’s; in other words, it is Offred’s lower body part that counts. Similarly, all Handmaids’ bodies are regarded as one body. Additionally, the chanting on the Birthday and

For Gileadean authority, the female body is treated as if there

the testifying in the Red Center also present this one body.

was only one body, a collective female body. Women are seen, not as individuals, but as
different groups of social roles. No matter what social status one woman has, her body means
nothing but its function, and she is replaceable by anyone with the same function . It is especially sarcastic
when the Commander confuses his own wife, Serena, with Martha Cora. As 10 he reveals the death of the previous Handmaid, Offred reflects his words: “She hanged herself,”
he says; thoughtfully, not sadly. “That’s why had the light fixture removed. In your room.” He pauses. “Serena found out,” he says, as if this explains it. And it does. If your dog
dies, get another. [ ] “I suppose it was Cora who found her,” I say. That’s why she screamed. “Yes,” he says. “Poor girl.” He means Cora. (187 emphasis added) Apparently, the
Handmaid’s death is as meaningless and trivial as the woman that discovered it because all women can be taken as one body for the Commander, who insinuates that the
female body in the old days is “the meat market” (219). Enlightened by Roberta Rubenstein’s discussion of blurred distinction between human and non-human, Karen Stein also
notices something that explains how the female body is objectified as one common thing, “The hanged bodies of Gilead’s victims are suspended from the walls of the former
Harvard Yard like slabs of meat on meathook” (64-5). In a way, all the strict control of Gileadian women’s, and in particular, Handmaids’ mind and body embodies to an extreme

To make women’s bodies useful but not dangerous, Gilead’s discipline, to

Foucault’s theory of disciplinary power.

borrow Foucault’s words, “is no longer simply an art of distributing bodies, of extracting time from them

and accumulating it, but of composing forces in order to obtain an efficient machine” (164). In this
carceral society in Gilead, as I have tried to show, women’s identities are simplified into
different roles, with each serving only one role and all forming an “efficient machine” of
household and procreation. No social machines, however, can exert their waterproof control on
their subjects, and, in the case of Offred, resistance starts in her very body.
The Docile Female Body – Where Resistance Starts
The Handmaid’s Tale – The Female Body as a Site of Resistance

Julia Pei-Hsuan Hsieh

The Handmaid’s Tale – The Female Body as a Site of Resistance

Julia Pei-Hsuan Hsieh

Analysis of food

Offred’s rebellious thinking develops as she receives more and more control on her body , and it
manifests itself first in Offred’s observation of her own body and then through her relating her body to food. With her body being disciplined, she

also has changed her attitude toward her own body. She reflects the big difference between her
concept of body as concrete, substantial and multifunctional in the old time, and the void she
feels within herself after her body becomes docile: I used to think of my body as an instrument,
of pleasure, or a means of transportation, or an implement for the accomplishment of my will. [ ]
There were limits, but my body was nevertheless lithe, single, solid, one with me. 11 Now the flesh arranges itself differently. I’m a

cloud, congealed around a central object, the shape of a pear, which is hard and more real than I
am and glows red within its translucent wrapping . [ ] It transits, pauses, continues on and passes out of sight, and I see despair coming
towards me like famine. To feel that empty, again, again. (74) Here the sense of emptiness is dubious to say the least. In one sense, Offred’s body is a docile one, concerned with

The want of conceiving a baby drives Offred desperate: in a way, she

not having a fetus fill up her empty womb.

needs the baby to survive in the Gilead since she has no chance left after the previous failures in
the other two households. In another, Offred experiences the despair of loss and the dread of
being left empty with nothing once more. To her, this baby is not merely a new life for the
household, but a new life for her. Atwood further illustrates how the female body, extraordinarily, can be torn apart in Gilead society. Through
Offred’s experience of her separated body and her sense of self, she reveals her shameful feeling of looking at her own body: My nakedness is strange to me already. My body
seems outdated. Did I really wear ething suits, at the beach? I did, without thought, among men, without caring that my legs, my arms, my thighs and back were on display,

Shameful, immodest. I avoid looking down at my body, not so much because it’s
could be seen.

shameful or immodest but because I don’t want to see it. I don’t want to look at something that
determines me so completely. (63) Here, her body has become “something,” an “it” that she
does not feel like claiming hers . Likewise, she experiences the separation of her body from herself by
composing her own body as “a thing” (66). Her identifying herself as a cloud that “congealed around a central object, the shape of a pear, which is
hard and more real than [she is] and glows red within its translucent wrapping” somehow may explain both her desire of conceiving a child and her complicated inner transition
of separating her body and her self. That is why she sometimes fails to tell the reality from her dream, because she recollects the dream in which she was with her child, and
then feels desperate and despair about her situation. Sometimes Offred reminisces and expresses her desolation: “Maybe the life I think I’m living is a paranoid delusion” (109).

she becomes devastated owing to the separation of

And sometimes, she hears something inside her body fall apart (146). All in all,

her body and self. With an attempt to keep her identity, this experience of the separation of the
body and the self, however, further enables Offred to realize how her female body is the object
of gaze, the object of desire, and is materialized as objects. Making the female body objectified, the Gilead authority penetrates
their power throughout the nation. And that further drives Offred to the edge so as to cherish her scarce power that she 12 secretly maintains for retaining her identity and her
name from the past. She remembers how she and all of the women in the pre-Gilead society lost their power to the Gilead authority. With her financial accounts frozen and her
job taken away, Offred feels “white, flat, thin” and transparent; back then, she started to question: “Surely they will be able to see through me. Worse, how will I be able to hold
onto Luke, to her [ ]” (85). She feels as if she is made of smoke, and the sense of being penetrated and seen through further deprives her of the calm, confidence and power.

Whatever she does, her body is

Then she later experiences similar nakedness and transparent when she is in the Commander’s study room.

always scrutinized and studied like an object by the Commander. Offred recollects her
uneasiness under his gaze: “While I read, the Commander sits and watches me doing it, without
speaking but also without taking his eyes off me. This watching is a curiously sexual act, and I
feel undressed while he does it” (184). The Commander’s demonstration of his power does not simply take place when he concentrates on Offred’s
body and movement. The night at the Jezebel’s, Offred is completely conscious the Commander uses her to show off. That night when she dresses up to the Jezebel’s with the
Commander, she is aware of her body as a body wearing a purple evening rental tag. Or, there are times Offred perceives how the Commander patronizes her as if she is “an
almost extinct animal” when he looks at her. Nevertheless, there are times that Offred enjoys being watched, for the scarce power that she experiences. When her power is
reduced to almost none, she uses her body as a source of power that further assists her to confirm her subjectivity. She uses her body as a seductive apparatus as she faces the
checkpoint Guards: They touch with their eyes instead and I move my hips a little, feeling the full red skirt sway around me. It’s like thumbing your nose from behind a fence and
teasing a dog with a bone held out of reach, and I’m ashamed of myself for doing it, because none of this is the fault of these men, they’re too young. Then I find I’m not
ashamed after all. I enjoy the power, power of a dog bone, passive but there. (22) And yet it is not merely Offred that is the target of gaze in Gilead. She is conscious that her
body is taken as a freight of hope of others, for she acknowledges other’s expectation on her; she realizes that herself is like “a queen ant with eggs” and “the vehicle” of other’s
hope (135). Through all the images of numerous objects and items, Offred understands very well how much her body and her womb have been objectified, and how much she is
reduced to the basic level of biological function of a female body, and that makes her even more anxious to restore her subjectivity. With her five senses’ becoming keener than
ever, Offred is also more critical in her observation of her body and the food. Here I would like to do a closer inspection on 13 Offred’s resistance through the correlated imagery
of the female body, food and eating in The Handmaids’s Tale. As in The Edible Woman, patriarchal control of women and women’s resistance in The Handmaid’s Tale find a
powerful expression in the comparison of the female body to foods, and the issue of who gets to own or consume these foods. In the epigraph, Atwood quotes from Swift’s The
Modest Proposal. Critics like Karen Stein compares Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale with Jonathan Swift’s The Modest Proposal; this comparison somehow explains that the
images of food, eating and the body, particularly the female body in The Handmaid’s Tale (as well as in The Edible Woman) is closely associated with food such as meat, as Stein
points out, The cannibal theme is carried out in several ways in Tale. On some level, the foods the handmaids eat, symbolic representations of wombs and fertility (pears, eggs,
chickens, bread described as baking in the oven), are analogues for their bodies. Additionally, one of Offred’s flashback memories recounts her childhood fear of cannibalism. [ ]
By means of this digression, Offred makes explicit the analogies between Gilead and Nazi Germany, and between her tale and “A Modest Proposal” (66-7). While trying to
maintain her bodily consciousness, Offred uses smell to make associations with the past, and with the women around her. From Marthas’s kitchen, for instance, she recollects
the smell of her kitchen in the old times, of the days when she was still a mother, still had a mother, and of the food smell. Also, she sympathizes with Marthas owing to their
constraint with endless chores in the kitchen and she is eager to communicate and connect with other women. The imagery of food is scattered in the text: The table has been
scrubbed off, cleared of flour; today’s bread, freshly baked, is cooling on its rack. The kitchen smells of yeast, a nostalgic smell. It reminds me of other kitchens, kitchens that

these imagery
were mine. It smells of mothers; although my own mother did not make bread. It smells of me, in former times, when I was a mother. (47) How does

of foods arouse her self-awareness and provoke her the want of self-preservation ? Offred regards this
kitchen full of smell of food a past memory and a warning as “a treacherous smell” that she should keep away from. Nonetheless, she reveals her longing of her old identity as a
mother and a daughter. Furthermore, her keen senses dwelling on the memory of being a mother and a daughter lead her to explore the smell that she notices in the sitting
room and with Serena Joy. Offred has complicated feelings toward Serena Joy, who may be her surrogate mother, that ought to look after her in the household. Truth is, Serena
does not actually care for Offred as a daughter. On the first day of Offred’s arrivel, Serena makes Offred understand her stance of the lady in the household, stressing on the
unchangeable relationship with 14 her husband, and her principle of seeing Offred as least as possible. Her cold attitude and sexless smells along with the tasteless collections in
the sitting room, in a way, have frustrated Offred and reminded her of the past when she was still a mother and still had a mother. Offred’s frustration in failing to connect with
Serena, therefore, has hardened her loneliness in the spatial constraint, and yet made her determined to move beyond her spatial limit. Through Offred’s narration, in Gilead

.
society, women’s bodies are very often compared to food. Hence, the food connected with the female body further reinforces the fact that the female body is materialized

Not only is the female body conditioned and kept in fixed positions in society, but women’s diet
is strictly controlled. Women’s pregnant bodies collage with images of foods such as pears, eggs,
oranges and lunch. Offred herself treats her body as food : she sways her body like a dog-bone to seduce the Guards and the
Angels as if they are dogs longing for food. Similarly, she compares herself as “a ripe melon” when she uses her body to imagine manipulating man: Did the sight of my ankle
make him lightheaded, faint, at the checkpoint yesterday, when I dropped my pass and let him pick it up for me? No handkerchief, no fan, I use what’s handy. Winter is not so
dangerous. I need hardness, cold, rigidity; not this heaviness, as if I’m a melon on a stem, this liquid ripeness. (154) On the Birthday, Ofwarren, whose real name is Janine,
requests for extra sugar and is instructed that too much sugar is not good for her body. Likewise, from time to time, Offred feels tempted whenever she sees Nick and the Wife
smoking. And when she is offered one cigarette from the Wife, she is warned not to have too much of it. Furthermore, food in Gilead does not simply mean the food that people
eat, it can also be an indication to social status. That is why when Offred brings home a bony chicken, Martha Rita complains about it, for she thinks the Commander’s rank
should make Offred be brave enough to speak up and get a better one (48). Later on the Birth day, Offred also notices that at the Ofwarren’s household, there are oranges which
may stand for the higher status of the whole household. In short, the abundant images of food in The Handmaid’s Tale first indicate how the female body can be controlled by
the regulation of diet and hence correlated with Atwood’s concern of social cannibalism. Like the food bearing something meaningful more than its substantial function, the
body appears in a form of a collage of food. That is, the body is compared to food and collaborated with the image of food. Like The Edible Woman, Atwood connects the female
body with the food in The Handmaids’s Tale and strengthens her observation of the analogy between the two. Women’s bodies of the past are compared to meat by the Aunts
so as to stress on the inappropriate exterior decoration: 15 The spectacles women used to make of themselves. Oiling themselves like roast meat on a spit, and bare backs and
shoulders, on the street, in public, and legs, not even stockings on them, no wonder those things used to happen. [ ] Such things do not happen to nice women. And not good for
the complexion, not at all, wrinkle you up like a dried apple. (55) For the Aunts, dressing with exposure of the female body is improper and justifiable reason for rape to take
place on women. In a way, remarks on the female body in the past for Aunt Lydia and Offred’s Commander are like meat. While the Commander and the Aunts comparing the
female body to food, Offred feels that the female body in Gilead is food, or is treated as if it were food. Here and there, I see Offred relate the female body to food. At the
doctor’s office, she is aware of the doctor’s calling her “honey,” which is a generic terms that Offred thinks it could represent all women. Among Marthas’ talk, she feels
uncomfortable when Rita is tenderizing the chicken and asks Cora to bathe Offred at the same time. The chicken reminds Offred of Handmaid’s body and Aunts’ teaching on the
importance of healthy food and Handmaid’s body: “The thigh of a chicken, overcooked. It’s better than bloody, which is the other way she does it. [ ] You have to get your
vitamins and minerals, said Aunt Lydia coyly. You must be a worthy vessel” (65). And later that night, though Offred feels repulsive, she does not dare throw up so she “chewed
and swallowed, chewed and swallowed” until she feels the sweat come out (65-66). Yet she does save some butter and hide it secretly for herself to use later at night. The Aunts
have been instructing the Handmaids that they are containers, only the interior body parts are important (96), in that case, Handmaids are not to tend to the appearance of the
female body. As in other novels by Atwood, the image of egg and the female body is connected, so can this be proved in The Handmaid’s Tale. Imaginative as Offred is, when
eating, she imagines the egg being “what God must look like,” and she remembers, “Women used to carry such eggs between their breasts, to incubate them” (110); old
memory of the past like this makes her pleased and desire for one. Here, the egg becomes a metaphor and a pun in Offred’s narration which reveals her crave and nostalgia.
Food as it is, the egg later becomes a suggestion to Offred of how much a pregnant woman could be operated on like the food people eat with the knifes and spoons. That is, the
image of Janine’s pregnant body as the food that is cut open by doctor’s knife and brought up when she eats up her food and the teaching she receives: Once they drugged
women, induced labor, cut them open, sewed them up. No more. No anesthetics, even. Aunt Elizabeth said it was better for the baby, but also: I will greatly multiply thy sorrow
and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children. At lunch we got that, brown bread and lettuce sandwiches. (114) 16 For Offred, she uses butter to maintain her
body. This gesture of connecting food with her body, which she compares to food from time to time, indicates how the female body is treated like edible in Gilead. As she recalls
that her body is supposed to be a useful one that produces babies, she also remembers, when she was young she had mistaken her mother’s story about the Jews in the old
time: she thought the Jews were cooked in the oven like food. Furthermore, she later compares the conceivable female body to an oven with bun and a chalice with wine.
Hence, words, the food she eats and the female body she sees have all become one in a very restricted circumstance under Gileadean surveillance, and that somehow has

Once the female body is regarded useful and

colluded to the Commander and the Aunt’s remarks on the female body which is like meat.

edible like food, it is hard for Offred to maintain her identity intact since her body becomes
consumable in the cannibalistic Gilead society. After the Salvaging ceremony, death triggers
Offred’s appetite. This implication, in one way, consolidates Atwood’s picture of a cannibalistic
society, and in another way, empowers her protagonist to transform her bodily resistance to
thinking and to the use of language.

The Writing Self in an Active Female Body – A Site of Resistance and

Construction for Subjectivity
The Handmaid’s Tale – The Female Body as a Site of Resistance

Julia Pei-Hsuan Hsieh

-reclaiming the past

Besides keeping her bodily consciousness as a way of preserving her identity, Offred actively
resists the overall control by criticizing the present and revising her past. In a way, beneath her
apparent passivity, she has been reflecting, revising, criticizing and reconstructing her past as
well as her present more and more actively. And in this aspect, she has been a story-teller in her
mind, a composer of her body, even before she disappears from Gilead and tells her story into
the tapes. The written body thus gets merged into the writing subject, and it all starts with
Offred’s sensitivity to and revision of Gilead’s language’s control. To maintain her subjectivity
and to rediscover her power, Offred tells the story, reconstructs her story, rephrases what she
has learned and heard, and shows her power in narrating what has happened in Gilead. She
rebuilds her subjectivity through her strong senses. Keen sensitivity helps her sharpen her
imagination and observation that are important to narration, and also helps remind her of the
past and preserve her real name. Only by sticking to refreshing her memory of her identity and
life in pre-Gilead society can Offred reconstruct her subjectivity and reaffirm her existence as an
individual. By investigating how Offred uses her narration as well as her body to resist Gilead’s
severe control, I intend to show the way she gradually discovers her power through language,
imagination, memory and, most importantly, her bodily actions. 17 Control is everywhere in
Gilead, just as Offred’s subtle revision of its verbal control. Offred’s hiding of her real name and
revision of her given name, first of all, shows her resistance. “Offred,” an indication of
patronymic ownership—of Fred—is turned in her mind into “off red,” or evading the
Handmaid’s sign of red color. Also, Offred’s sensitivity of verbal constraint makes her notice that
the stocks of biblical phrases and teachings that all the Handmaids are forced to bear in mind
contain a great deal of ironies. For instance, the literal biblical dialogue of Leah connects giving
birth with death. She uses puns to interpret the words she hears with different meanings such
as the word “Mayday,” as M’aidez, a French distress call, and “date rape” as a French dessert
name. Mario Klarer regards Offred’s narration and searching for different meanings of words as
a process that “is not only the key to gaining access to the past, but also provides the possibility
of anticipating the future, or that which does not yet exist” (134). That is to say, in the language-
forbidden nation where words are reduced and simplified as wooden signs and biblical scrolls,
language assists her to retain her subjectivity and struggle for a possible future. Though her
body is a docile one, her capability in using the language is a kind of power. As Stein indicates,
with the red robe and white wimples, the Handmaids are all synchronized as one so that the
central power of Gilead may deprive their individuality, and Marian does not feel comfortable
with the color-coded dress. By revealing the discomfort in her red dress, Offred insinuates her
capability in using the language to construct her identity and subjectivity: “ and myself in it like a
distorted shadow, a parody of something, some fairy-tale figure in a red cloak, descending
towards a moment of carelessness that is the same as danger. A Sister, dipped in blood” (9). This
paradox in a way shows that Offred tries to turn the traditional meaning of the fairy tales or the
biblical teaching into a paradox, attempting to use language to mock Gilead society and vents
her dissatisfaction of the restricted reality. Another revision of the Aunt’s lesson is in the
teaching of not to think, which is later proved to be impossible for Offred. At night and when left
alone in her bed, she first consoles herself that if she wants to last, she has to listen to aunts’
advice: not to think too much because “[t]here’s a lot that doesn’t bear thinking about” (8),
since thinking can possibly ruin her chance and she intends to strive for living. Then, in allowing
herself to think, she associates Aunt Lydia’s instruction with that of a ballet class teacher in the
past: “She said, Think of yourselves as seeds” (18)—that is, seeing the present self-preservation
as a seed for future rebellion and changes. Offred learns to indulge herself to swerve from the
reality and wander in the word-plays. Since Gilead is a confining realm that strictly controls the
people’s movement and language, Offred’s secret word-plays becomes a monologue that also
brings along moments in her past life. It is this severe confinement in body and language that
forces her to 18 develop her individuality through imagination, reflection and rebellion. As Stein
has mentioned, the Aunts act out as women surrogates of the patriarchal power, for “[they]
transmit the words of the patriarchal government, and they silence unwanted speech” (271).
The stock of biblical phrases stressed by the Fundamentalism is a measure of controlling,
brainwashing and constraining. Teachings such as “Pen is Envy,” “Blessed be the meek,” and
“Blessed are the silent” are short memorable and yet ironical to all Handmaids. The Handmaids
are made to rehearse, memorize and thus internalize the sayings given in the Red Center. All of
this emphasis on silence and meekness makes their bodies disciplined and without really
suppressing their desire for a pen or penis. What is more ironical is the teachings like “Give me
children, or else I die,” which emphasizes women’s own desire for bearing children, but actually
suggests the consequence of failing to apparently perform this obligation. Ironically, then, giving
birth becomes literally a life-and-death matter for women even without the risks of dystocia. In
addition to the birth-death irony, the Aunt’s teaching of “Pen is Envy” also explains that verbal
constraint collaborates with bodily constraint. The rigorous regulations in Gilead forbid women
to speak freely, to have access to anything concerned with language and words, for silence and
meekness are considered virtues. Here, again Atwood plays with words through Offred’s
narration. The phrase itself could be a pun. In the realm of Gilead, where words and any tools
leading for knowledge are banned, as a writing tool, pen becomes the source of envy for Offred.
During the secret meeting with the Commander, she is allowed to read magazines and even to
write with a pen when she tries to ask a question to the Commander. As Offred recalls, the
momentary gesture of writing and holding a pen in her hands becomes erotic and sensational so
that she even feels like breaking the rule and stealing it as another act of rebellion. The pen
between my fingers is sensuous, alive almost, I can feel its power, the power of the words it
contains. Pen Is Envy, Aunt Lydia would say, quoting another Center motto, warning us away
from such objects. And they were right, it is envy. Just holding it is envy. I envy the Commander
his pen. It’s one more thing I would like to steal. (186) Apparently, Offred breaks the ban on pen
Gilead puts on women. However, one cannot help being reminded of Freud’s famous
description of women’s “Penis Envy.” As Psychoanalysis would not be the theoretical reference
for this thesis, I would like to simply say that Atwood’s witty word-play is a sarcastic comment
on man power whose absoluteness has been supported by not only Gilead but also Freud. As
the word-play games show Offred’s imagination and sensitivity to language, the puns related to
body also disclose her rebellion in a way. As Lawrence Davies 19 conceives the idea of puns and
breaking language bars, he connects Offred’s punning gesture to the behavior of someone that
“both exhilarated and alarmed by language, by its power of making and of breaking bonds”
(210). No matter what this word-playing or elaboration indicates, making/breaking the
boundaries or denying connections between words, in any ways, Offred’s power grows as she
gets access to words. For instance, Offred ponders on “habit” that the Handmaids are wearing:
“Habits are hard to break” (24-5). What she means may be ambiguous due to the meaning of
the word “habit.” It could indicate both a certain of religious ropes like the red ones that the
Handmaids wear and the custom or practice that Offred she has. She could have referred to the
prison-like durable clothing she wears, but she could also mean the word-playing games that go
on and on within her mind or her other habitual secret practices in life. Also, when Ofglen
circumambulates with the password of “Mayday,” Offred’s afterthought reveals her longing for
her past. Mayday used to be a distress signal, a long time ago in one of those wars we studied in
high school. I kept getting them mixed up, but you could tell them apart by the airplanes if you
paid attention. It was Luke who told me about mayday, though. Mayday, mayday, for pilots
whose planes had been hit, and ships. (41) She then recalls the real meaning in French, “help
me.” This short passage speaks Offred’s nostalgic feeling about the old days and her keen
awareness how words can bear different meanings and serve different functions. Most of all,
accesses to words and language have become a luxury and power in the forbidding status of an
autocratic government. As changing the language and the connection with the people
surrounding her gives Offred a sense of power, likewise, through her body, food and eating, she
discovers her power little by little. In terms of the act of seduction, she uses her body as food to
perform her scarce power. She also feels the power when she plays the scrabble with the
Commander. On the touch of the scrabble counters, Offred feels tempted by the wooden words
and would like to swallow the scrabble counters so as to retain the power. The power that she
has received from playing the scrabble game comes from her access of language and knowledge,
and makes her want to eat up the wooden word counters. Also, the words on the scrabble
board somehow remind her of the past, which reaffirms her identity secretly. And reading as
fast as possible whenever she is given the chance of reading indicates her longing for knowing
and for remembering. Gilead bans the language and words which are powerful keys to
knowledge, and this restriction reminds Offred how much she is confined; more and more, she
acknowledges what a passive role she is playing as a Handmaid. Both Klarer and Madonne Miner
discuss this language ban on reading and writing: Klarer sees it as a measure of preventing “the
‘privilege’ of objectivity from getting into the hands of 20 women” (134) whereas Miner
considers this ban of language an easy way for men to claim the authority and deprive women
of their power. Without freedom in articulation and in knowledge, at times Offred feels
distressed. In the Commander’s compound, she misses the old times and decides to take
advantage of her imagination and her memory of the old days. Like a chipmunk trapped in her
cage, the room she is not yet familiar with, she strives to explore the room gradually. And the
more she observes her surroundings in her own space, the more she thinks of the past and is
attacked by solitude: I looked up at the blind paster eye in the ceiling. I wanted to feel Luke lying
beside me. I have them, these attacks of the past, like faintness, a wave sweeping over my head.
Sometimes it can hardly be borne. What is to be done, what is to be done, I thought. There is
nothing to be done. They also serve who only stand and wait. Or lie down and wait. I know why
the glass in the window is shatterproof, and why they took down the chandelier. I wanted to
feel Luke lying beside me, but there wasn’t room. (52) The “blind paster eye in the ceiling” is the
result from a cruel past, a story and a legend of the dead Handmaid before Offred. In this
passage, she describes her loneliness and emptiness caused by the limited, prison-like
constraint; she uncovers her sense of helplessness when she thinks of her destiny which may be
like the former Handmaid or be unknown as yet. She is not left with many choices and she is
very much restricted in the space which is severely watched and controlled. She realizes her
situation as being confined by the limited space and movement. Worst of all, she is always
awaiting, for the demands, expectations and the time for rituals and routines. Not only is Offred
like a waiting woman in the attic, awaiting for the Ceremony and calls from the Commander, but
her body and mind is full of memory in terms of the consistent search of her past experience by
sensational touch and creative imagination when she is with herself. Indeed, Offred is very much
framed in Gilead, just like certain fairy tale figures framed in the fixed spot. Her red habit makes
her identify herself with the fairy-tale figures, possibly the Little Red Riding Hood or Repunzel. In
a way, she is like Little Red Riding Hood, whose body runs for others’ demands. For instance, she
is sent to run the chores by the Marthas. Later in the novel, she is also sent to Nick by Serena
Joy. While the Marthas and Serena Joy serve as the role of the practical surrogate mothers for
Offred, she is aware of her very restricted and scrutinized condition. Besides, Offred also
resembles the fairy tale figure Rapunzel. She spends most of her time waiting in her room for
the summons from the Commander, the Wife or the Marthas. Her long waiting posture in the
attic and her long hair makes her a Rapunzel. Gilead requires the Handmaids to keep long hair.
Offred’s long hair may not be as 21 beautiful as Rapunzel’s, however, the hair does not offer any
power at all, for all the Handmaids are required to put on the wimple which blocks their sight
and forces them to look straight ahead. In other words, for Offred, Gilead becomes a forest
where all the gestures and languages become dangerous as a Little Red Riding Hood, as well as
for rebellion; where Offred is, like Rapunzel, given a mere window to look at the world. Only
when she is alone in the room does she use her keen sensation to search for clues of the room
in the past, to reflect on her identity, and memory in the past. Yet, strained as her body is,
Offred knows she has to break the bond and struggles to move ahead beyond the spatial
constraint. Therefore, in her own room, where she uses her imagination to move beyond the
limited space and preserve her name, dreaming of one day that she could tell someone about
her real name. Namely, her room gives her a sense of self-preservation through which she
retains her identity and her name. Besides repeating her name secretly and reminding herself
her real identity, Offred uses her sensitivity to preserve her identity. As she grows to be more
sensitive to smell and taste, she also recalls more of her past life even when she is trapped in
the sitting room or anywhere in Gilead. In her own room, Offred learns to preserve her body
with the butter, which further indicates her instinct of maintaining her own body like the old
time. Through these gestures of self-preservation, Offred reveals her strong intention of
retaining her old identity, not as Offred, but as herself with a real name that identifies her as an
individual. More actively, she begins to rebel through various bodily actions and attempts. First,
she attempts to steal something from the sitting room, as she reveals, “I would like to steal
something from this room. I would like to take some small thing, [ ] secret it in my room” (80).
Then she wishes further to “steal” Luke from the past into her present room because she feels
like being sure of her identity and lusts for a body: I want Luke here so badly. I want to be held
and told my name. I want to be valued, in ways that I am not; I want to be more than valuable. I
repeat my former name, remind myself of what I once could do, how others saw me. I want to
steal something. (97) It is the lack of identity that makes Offred a needy person that drives her
to convince herself that Luke is somehow alive. She even believes that Luke will have a message
“[s]lipped into [her] hand as [she] reach the tokens across the counter in All Flesh” (106). When
her hope for Luke gradually fades away, she turns to Nick to satisfy her needs for self-assertion.
Nick becomes someone that she tells her real name to, and someone she goes to secretly, even
without the consent of Serena Joy. This, too, can be considered a proof of Offred’s bodily action
of rebellion against the powerful Gilead authority. Finally, her turning everything unspeakable
about Gilead, about her past and herself 22 into audible texts is by all means a form of
resistance against the language-banned society. Her thoughts, views, memory and what
happened to her have all been textualized as tapes, and that has somehow become a latent
threat to and a possible obsolete of Gilead society. That is to say, through Offred’s story-telling,
she has turned her mouth a tool of resistance because narration can be taken as an act of
reconstruction and imagination, which indeed occurs once in a while when she tells the story. As
Celia Flor?n indicated: “the transmission of the story is frequently being questioned by the
narrator” (258), at times, Offred distrusts her own story and revises her story from time to time.
But the act of revising the story, in a way, reinforces her power of narration. She becomes an
author who manipulates the audio texts. And by simply telling the story and revising the story,
she has the power of demonstrating her resistance to Gilead. She shows the same resisting spirit
when she tries to find out Ofglen’s whereabouts. Later she realizes that Ofglen sacrifices herself
to protect her; Offred becomes willing to identify with the rebellious organization at the end of
her story. Though suspecting Nick’s betrayal, she cooperates with Nick’s instruction and get onto
the Eye’s van. To this extent, she is not as passive as before and takes a more active attitude in
rebelling against the regime. In addition to her bodily action against the totalitarian, there are
two attempts of hers that show her active resistance against Gilead – one is her attempt to
make connections with people around her and with the past, and the other is her attempt to
change the language she has been forced to adapt to. Not merely with Ofglen does Offred try to
connect herself with, but with other Handmaids, the Marthas, and Nick. By building connections
with people around her, she gets to feel more strength and find out more about what’s
happening. Knowing is in itself a power, and by getting to know and to express through the
connection with others, Offred gets more power and further acts out her alternative resistance.
Moreover, by reflecting on the past, she gets to be more affirmative and determined to retain
her identity. Through repetitively assuring herself of who she really is and what has happened in
the past, she keeps her faith in living/surviving. Offred’s other attempts of challenging the
meaning of the language. In many biblical phrases and teachings that she has been forced to
memorize, she criticizes and corrects Aunts’ interpretations. When Nick speaks to her, she
merely nods and recalls what she is told by the Aunts: He isn’t supposed to speak to me. Of
course some of them will try, said Aunt Lydia. All flesh is weak. All flesh is grass, I corrected her
in my head. They can’t help it, she said, God made them that way but He did not make you that
way. He made you different. It’s up to you to set the boundaries. Later you will be thanked. (45)
Her sensitivity to language makes her pay attention to even detail and little things in people’s
talk. She corrects and criticizes those she does not agree with and try to 23 rephrase what she
has heard. For instance, she reflects how Aunt Lydia admonishes women in the past that have
made spectacles by showing off their flesh. Aunt Lydia concludes that “things” happened to
these women with a reason and lectures to Handmaids to be good because “[s]uch things do
not happen to nice women. And not good for the complexion [ ].” Those “things” she mentions
do hard to women’s complexion and made women like “dried apple” (55). Meanwhile, Offred
recalls that it is Aunt Lydia herself that has told the Handmaids not to pay attention to their
complexions. In other words, Offred mocks Aunt Lydia for her contradicting herself in the talk
addressing to the Handmaids. Little rebellion like this brings Offred more strength of remaining
her subjectivity and identity because she realizes that she has the power to change something,
like language. As she compares her reading with eating voraciously, her bodily resistance also
becomes more active than before. In the mean time, that she reckons the Commander needs
her empowers her. Gradually, Offred perceives her little power not merely from men, but from
women superior to her status. As she thinks of the possible consequences of being caught of
secretly meeting the Commander, she knows that the Commander would not risk saving her.
However, somehow she feels the power over the Wife, for she reckons: “Also: I now had power
over her, of a kind, although she didn’t know it. And I enjoyed that. Why pretend? I enjoyed it a
lot” (162). Flor?n discovers “a circle of deceit” among the Commander’s household, and in the
circle, “The handmaid deceives both the husband and the wife with Nick and the Commander,
respectively” (255). This deception further accounts for Offred’s experience of power over both
the Commander and the Wife. All in all, Offred discovers her power and realizes that she could
derive the power from her body, food and the act of eating. Although the ending of The
Handmaid’s Tale does not reveal Offred’s hwere about or whether she is dead or alive, she has
constructed a sense of subjectivity by telling the story as a record for the post-Gilead society.
Through her narration, she uses her mouth as a weapon of rebellion, and resists the severe
control and surveillance of the totalitarian Gilead regime. With very limited power that she has
received from her rare chance of reading and performing seductively in the face of men, Offred
smartly uses her body, the act of eating, food and the connection of food and her body to
perform her power. In the search of herself, her past and her identity, the power helps her build
a sense of subjectivity. As she calls her own room a “treacherous territory,” she rediscovers her
strength and manages to move beyond the limited space where she is trapped. Against a
powerful society like Gilead as she may have confronted, Offred struggles to find a way for her
to withhold her identity and subjectivity under an absolute patriarchal sovereignty. It is hard to
tell if Offred is rescued or betrayed at the 24 end of her story, which are tape records later
transcribed and rearranged into the novel by two male professors in the post Gilead time. But
with one glimpse on Atwood’s ending in The Handmaid’s Tale, it is not hard to find how neither
the society before, nor after Gilead, regime has been different that much from each other.
Namely, patriarchal domineering power which is still active in the post-Gilead society. how the
female body has always been treated as objects of male dominance. It is, finally, to such similar
situations in Taiwan that I will turn to in my conclusion.
Working through the state isn’t an option as that wouldn’t solve the everyday
surveillance of women
AUTUMN WHITEFIELD-MADRANO 13 (“I’ll Be Watching You: NSA Surveillance and the
Male Gaze”, June 18, 2013, http://thenewinquiry.com/blogs/the-beheld/ill-be-watching-you-
nsa-surveillance-and-the-male-gaze/, Accessed 7/17/15, EHS MKS)
I would give readers a quick 101 on the NSA surveillance scandal before I go on to make my point, but the fact is, I’ve got no facts. I
saw the headlines, heard the occasional bits of cocktail party buzz, and saw a flurry of blog posts—which I skimmed at best, or
skipped altogether—crop up in my RSS feed. And then, I shrugged. Apathy doesn’t seem like the greatest reason to tune out of
something that, intellectually and politically speaking, enrages me—or at least should enrage me, if rage were a rational response
that arose upon provocation of our most deeply held beliefs. But there it is: In a country whose founding principles include freedom
of expression, learning that the government is—what, reading our e-mails? listening to our phone conversations?—this citizen’s
response is meh. The longer this story has remained in the news, the more bizarre my apathy seemed to me. Until it didn’t. I began
to wonder if the reason the NSA activities didn’t upset me more on a visceral level, as opposed to
an intellectual one, was that my default assumption of day-to-day experience was that I was
being watched. Watched by Big Brother? Not so much. But being watched, observed, surveyed,
seen? Yes. Welcome to what it’s like to be a woman, gentlemen. Consider the headline of this excellent
piece by Laurie Penny in New Statesman, spurred by the NSA revelations: If you live in a surveillance state for long
enough, you create a censor in your head . It’s an incisive, uncomfortable truth, and it’s made all the more
uncomfortable when coupled with one of my favorite passages from John Berger’s Ways of Seeing: A woman must
continually watch herself. … Whilst she is walking across a room or weeping at the death of her
father, she can scarcely avoid envisaging herself walking or weeping . From earliest childhood she
has been taught and persuaded to survey herself continually. … Men look at women . Women watch
themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to
themselves. The
surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an
object—and most particularly an object of vision: a sight. To conflate Penny and Berger: If you spend a lifetime
housing your internal surveyor, you might not be terribly surprised when you find that there are external surveyors you hadn’t
considered. Not that women walk through our days consciously considering that men might be looking at us. In fact, that’s part of
the point: Being seen becomes such a default part of the way you operate that it ceases to be something you need to be actively
aware of. Not that the cold slap of Hey, baby is ever so far away as to keep women truly unaware of the public dynamic surrounding
gender. In urban areas (and plenty of non-urban areas too), we deal with street harassment so frequently that it begins to feel
difficult to overestimate just how much we’re actually being observed by passersby. The
triumphant joke of the tinfoil-
hat crowd rings frightfully true in the light of the NSA activities—just because you’re paranoid,
doesn’t mean they’re not after you—is yesterday’s news to women. Am I actually being looked at—
specifically by men, and specifically as a woman—every time I leave my house? Probably not. But the expectation or possibility of
being seen has been there as long as I can remember. And the minute I think I’ve slipped out of the observation zone—by wearing a
dowdy outfit that conceals my body, or simply by being in my own world for a moment—there’s a catcall there to remind me that
even if I’m not paranoid, that doesn’t mean they’re…not afterme (I hope!). But there, watching. I’m trying to think of how I’d process
the news that our “for the people, by the people” government can invade our privacy anytime it damn well pleases, if I hadn’t ever
internalized the sensation of being observed. I imagine I’d be more surprised, for starters, but I also wonder if I’m asking the wrong
question here. As humans, we love little more than to watch each other in a variety of ways (is TV anything other than controlled
people-watching?). Men
are observed too—differently than women are, but it’s not like men are
entirely unaware that they’re being seen by others. Here I turn to Robin James, Ph.D., associate professor of
philosophy at UNC Charlotte: “I’m thinking that (properly masculine, i.e. white, etc.) men experience surveillance in profoundly
enabling ways,” she wrote to me when I asked her to expand on a Twitter exchange we had. “[B]eing watched by someone who you
know is your equal (that is, you watch them, they watch you in return) is what reaffirms both of your statuses as equals, as subjects,
etc. If your gaze isn’t returned in kind, that means you’re not considered an equal, that you’re not seen as a real member of society.”
All emphasis there is mine, and for a reason: The point isn’t that women don’t observe men, or that men
don’t observe one another, but that the quality of the gaze is different . I don’t walk down the street and
feel like I have less cultural weight than my male peers. But when you’re 12—the age I was when I heard my first
catcall from an adult man, and my young age here is hardly unusual—you do have less cultural
weight, you do have less power. You learn early on to associate being observed for your
femininity with powerlessness, and that’s not an easy mind-set to she d. (Which is exactly why street
harassment has long been an effective tool of oppression, but that’s another story.) Broad strokes here: Men don’t have that
experience. Rather, they didn’t until it came out that the National Security Agency—a greater
power than virtually every man in the country—could watch you whenever they pleased. Here are
a few of the things that may result for women from objectification, whether it comes from others or internally as a result of being
objectified by others: Depression. Limiting one’s social presence. Temporarily lowered cognitive functioning. (Of course, there are
also suggestions that self-objectification may boost some women’s well-being. Another day, another post.) When I look at these
effects and compare them with where I’m at intellectually about the NSA privacy invasions—a shrinking of oneself versus righteous
outward anger—I’m troubled. Would I feel more righteous anger if I hadn’t learned to absorb, possibly to my personal detriment,
the effects of objectification and tacitly accepted surveillance as something that just happens? And more importantly: Has the
collective energy of women been siphoned into this realm, leaving us less energy for, as they say, leaning in? I’m not saying that just
because women might be used to being watched by men means that we’re inherently blasé about being watched by governmental
bodies; in fact, I’m guessing some women are more outraged than they would be if they were male, even if they’re not directly
connecting that outrage with womanhood. (Also, I don’t believe the male gaze to be wholly responsible for my indifferent reaction
here; it’s just the one that’s relevant.) Let’s also not forget that 56% of Americans deem phone surveillance as an acceptable
counterterrorism measure. And I’m certainly not saying that we shouldn’t be concerned about the NSA revelations; we should. But
not only are women more used to being watched, we also have a worldwide history of dealing
with our governments jumping in where they don’t belong. It feels invasive whether that space
is our phone line or our uterus. It just might not feel all that surprising.
 SF Key
Science fiction helps to destroy hierarchy’s- means SF is key to destroy
patriarchy
Fekete, 1 (John, Professor Emeritus of Cultural Studies and English Literature at Trent
University, as well as a member of the Cultural Studies PhD Program and the Centre for the
Study of Theory, Culture, and Politics. Recognized as an international figure in the field of
modern and postmodern theory and in the antifoundational transformation of theory from the
1970s, March 2001, “Doing the Time Warp Again: Science Fiction as Adversarial Culture,”
Science Fiction Studies, #83 = Volume 28, Part
http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/review_essays/fek83.htm)

Able to create radically different forms of thought – form post discourses (?)

Science fiction commentary today largely presupposes the democratization and decentralization
of the modern system of Art, and the revaluation made possible by the loosening of the value
hierarchy that had authorized the exalted status of a centralized high Art canon and the
correspondingly low status of the popular or commercial literatures and paraliteratures (to
which sf has tended to belong). The nuts and bolts discourse on sf nowadays shows little anxiety
about the genre’s non-canonical status. The agendas of Science Fiction Studies, the pre-eminent
regular home of academic sf scholarship, for example, have shifted during the 1990s, as indeed
the journal anticipated at the beginning of that decade (Csicsery-Ronay Jr., "Editorial"). As a
result, a variety of deconstructive and counter-canonical readings have increased the theoretical
density of the journal and given it a new-left intellectual face that is double-coded, Janus-like,
turning both to cultural critique and to a critique of the traditional presuppositions of critique. It
is interesting to note a continuing consensus in sf scholarship on advancing the adversarial
culture and producing an alternative discourse around creative writing of an alternativist
character. At the same time, critiques frequently "post" their own grounding, as happens with
other double-codings of postmodern culture, where the basic intellectual categories
(certainties) of modernity are called into question and recoded. Feminist and post-feminist,
Marxist and post-marxist, modernist and post-modernist, humanist and post-humanist,
historicist and post-historicist, gendered and post-gendered analytic and theoretic modes of
discourse step by step refashion a dialogic space that begins to appear post-critical. It is
probably fair to say that the "posting" of the adversarial culture foreseen in Baudrillard’s
hypothesis of the hyperreal reduction of distance between the fictive and the real, in Lyotard’s
libidinal aesthetic, and in the assumptions of a number of postmodern antifoundationalists, has
not yet been robustly theorized or persuasively disseminated. Nevertheless, the post-critical
horizons of science fiction discourse have been announced, even if related agendas are only
slowly and cautiously emerging. Into this context arrives Carl Freedman’s Critical Theory and
Science Fiction. In a science fiction milieu where dedicated works of theory reflecting on the
nature of science fiction itself are relatively rare, such a book is to be welcomed, especially as it
makes a real contribution by drawing attention to relationships between critical theory and sf.
At the same time, the book has a strong adversarial parti pris that seems emblematic of an
earlier time, or perhaps of the more traditional pole of an emerging debate. The book’s twin
purposes—to show that science fiction is an intrinsically critical-theoretical generic mode, and to
establish canonizing, critical-theoretical readings of five best-of-type sf texts by Stanislaw Lem,
Ursula K. Le Guin, Joanna Russ, Samuel R. Delany, and Philip K. Dick—draw a line in the sand.
The proposed generic definition and related critical canon will select out much of known science
fiction and select in a limited array of texts grounded on historiosophical or philosophical
premises that have much in common with the foundations of the selective traditions of elite
Literature. The bottom line is that a highly selective generic definition of the kind that Freedman
proposes would substantially narrow the legitimate membership of the sf genre and dovetail at
least in part with impulses toward the kind of legitimation that is neither in the interests of the
wide audiences that appreciate sf for its variety, nor any longer necessary as a strategy for
drawing academic attention to sf. On closer scrutiny, indeed, the exclusionary legitimating
argument turns out to be working the other side of the street, using the known and
demonstrable appeals of sf to legitimate a narrowly critical reading strategy.

Feminist science fiction theorists are key-instead of seeing women and nature
as objects to be “mastered” they counter this normative notion with an
alternative mindset of pressing on the importance of connection, not
exploitation, of the Earth. People would no longer seek to dominate the nature,
but seek to understand their entanglement and relationship with nature.
Donawerth, 1990 (Jane Donawerth, Professor at the University of Maryland, serves as
Director of Writing Programs, has had multiple books published, “Utopian Science:
Contemporary Feminist Science Theory and Science Fiction,” pp. 548-550, 1990, PDF from
JSTOR,)

Feminist science theorists have shown that male scientists from the seventeenth century on
have conceived of nature as a potentially unruly woman to be mastered and penetrated for her
secrets. "The image of nature that became important in the early modern period was that of a
disorderly and chaotic realm to be subdued and controlled," argues Carolyn Merchant. Nature is
conceived of by scientists as associated with women, according to Sandra Harding, and "an
immensely powerful threat that will rise up and overwhelm culture unless [it] exerts severe
controls."'9As an alternative to the destructive view of nature in traditional male science,
feminist science theorists posit a revision of nature and humanity's relation to her. "Women's
identification with earth and nature," argues Joan Rothschild, must form "the basis for
transforming our values and creating new ecological visions." Such a new science, according to
Haraway, would stress connection to, not domination over nature; according to Evelyn Fox
Keller, it would see nature not as passive but as resourceful; according to Merchant it would be
as "antihierarchical"; and according to Rose it would stress "the feminine value of harmony
with nature" (according to Rose). Such a science would seek "new and pacific relationships
between humanity and nature and among human beings themselves," argues Hilary Rose; and
according to Keller, it would seek "not the power to manipulate, but empowerment-the kind
of power that results from an understanding of the world around us, that simultaneously
reflects and affirms our connection to that world."20 Such a vision of nature has long been
implicit, and more recently, explicit in women's science fiction. In Andre Norton's Breed to Come
(1972), for example, humans return to an earth their race had almost destroyed and tell the
intelligent felines who have risen to civilization, "Do not try to change what lies about you; learn
to live within its pattern, be a true part of it." The former Terrans are warning the current ones
not to produce a destructive technology but to develop a partnership with nature. The view of
nature of men and women in works by women is often sharply different. In Sargent's The Shore
of Women(1986), women's scriptures record "the spirit of Earth, in the form of the Goddess"
speaking to women: "You gave men power over Me, and they ravaged Me. You gave them
power over yourselves, and they made you slaves. They sought to wrest my secrets from Me
instead of living in harmony with Me." As a result, women assume political power, and enforce
separation from men as well as limited technology and limited reproduction that keep the
ecology in balance. Even in the prototype of all science fiction, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein
(1818), the concept of harmony with nature is implicit, a concept that Frankenstein violates with
his science. Whereas Elizabeth's relation to nature-"the sublime shapes of the mountains, the
changes of the seasons, tempest and calm, the silence of winter, and the life and turbulence of
our Alpine summers"-was one of "admiration and delight," Frankenstein's view of "the world
was . . . a secret which I desired to divine." His obsession begins when he leaves for the all-male
society at the university where there "were men who had penetrated deeper" than those who
"had partially unveiled the face of Nature, but [to whom] her immortal lineaments were still a
wonder and a mystery." In utopian fictions by women science fiction writers, the most common
metaphor for the relation of humans to nature is "the web of nature." In Piercy's, Woman on
the Edge of Time (1976) Luciente warns Connie, "We're part of the web of nature," when she
urges putting immortality, or at least longevity, as a major goal of science; and in Joan
Slonczewski's Door into Ocean (1986), scientists facilitate nature's own processes, "when the
web stretches . . . to balance life and death." Thus feminist science theorists and women science
fiction writers share a utopian vision of nature and science in partnership.2' As a result of the
inclusion of women in science, feminist historians of science and science theorists have argued
that a revised science would be different because of the culturally different qualities assigned to
women. A feminist science will include acknowledgement of subjectivity in its methods; it will
look at problems not just analytically but also holistically ; it will aim for the complex answer as
best and most honest; and it will be decentralized and organized cooperatively. In all these
ways, a feminist science is utopian, since these conditions, values, and goals do not describe
contemporary science. In feminist science theory, subjectivity as an ideal includes feelings,
intuition, and values. "A feminist epistemology [for the sciences]," writes Hilary Rose, "insists on
the scientific validity of the subject, on the need to unite cognitive and affective domains; it
emphasizes holism, harmony, and complexity rather than reductionism, domination, and
linearity." In A Feeling for the Organism, Evelyn Fox Keller reads Barbara Mc- Clintock's scientific
career as an example of allowing "the objects of . . . study [to] become subjects in their own
right," thus "fostering a sense of the limitations of the scientific method, and an appreciation of
other ways of knowing." A study by scientist Jan Harding suggests that girls in our society who
choose scientific careers more often than boys who do so recognize that "science has social
implications," and choose science as a means of developing "relatedness, capacity for concern,
and an ability to see things from another's perspective." Subjectivity in science must also
encompass values and ethical context: science must be "context dependent" according to
Merchant, connected to "social implications" according to Jan Harding, based on "relational
thinking" according to Hein, grounded in women's experience and, so, a "labor of love"
according to Rose.22
Feminist science fiction makes us reflect on the history of science and its
impacts on women
Donawerth, 1990 (Jane Donawerth, Professor at the University of Maryland, serves as
Director of Writing Programs, has had multiple books published, “Utopian Science:
Contemporary Feminist Science Theory and Science Fiction,” pp. 537-539, 1990, PDF from
JSTOR, Accessed: 7/11/15 RH)

The concern for increased participation by women in science has an analogous utopian
reflection in science fiction by women. A crucial difference between the science depicted in
men's science fiction and women's science fiction is, quite simply, the participation of women. In
Metamorphoses of Science Fiction, Darko Suvin has rightfully pointed out the lack of women
scientists in American science fiction (but failed to add that he had read almost exclusively
science fiction by men). Since at least the early 1960s, women writers have regularly
characterized women as scientists; examples include Mary, biologist and specialist in alien
communication in Naomi Mitchison's Memoirs of a Spacewoman (1962); the biologist Takver
and the physicist Mitis in Ursula K. Le Guin's The Dispossessed (1974); Kira, biologist, M.D., and
"the de facto head of her department at the university" in Pamela Sargent's Cloned Lives (1972-
76); Margaret, the black computer expert in Up the Walls of the World (1978) by James Tiptree,
Jr. (Alice Sheldon); Varian, vet- erinary xenobiologist and co-leader of the expedition in Anne
Mc- Caffrey's Dinosaur Planet Survivors (1984); and Jeanne Velory, black physicist and astronaut
in Vonda McIntyre's Barbary (1986). Even the earliest woman writer for the pulp magazines,
Clare Winger Harris, in a 1928 short story, includes a woman scientist: Hildreth, chemist and
astronomer, assistant to her father in his home laboratory and soon to be assistant to her new
husband. This interest of women science fiction writers in women scientists seems not only a
result of changes in women's careers in the 1960s but also of the struggle to educate women in
the sciences in the late nineteenth century.4 Women scientists as characters in women's science
fiction, moreover, seem a legacy of the earlier feminist utopias. In Mary Bradley Lane's Mizora
(1880-81), for example, chemists and mechanical engineers make the all-woman society a
technological utopia. And in Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland (1915), female geneticists have
bred crop-producing and disease-resistant trees, as well as quiet cats that do not kill birds, while
other women have developed sciences unknown to Gilman's con- temporaries-language as a
science, sanitation, nutrition, and a kind of psychology-history. The feminist utopias, as well as
contemporary wom-en's science fiction, make us see a history of women in science, not just a
few great women who seem to be historical anomalies. In one of the earliest feminist utopias,
ThreeHundred YearsHence (1836), written when most women were still denied college
educations, Mary Griffith shows a future historian relating a woman's invention of a new power
that replaces steam, as well as restoring proper credit to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, "for
introducing into England the practice of inoculation for the small-pox." Such a vision of restoring
women to the history of science is shared by Naomi Mitchison in Memoirs of a Spacewoman;her
hero Mary reflects: I may be out of date, but I always feel that biology and, of course,
communication are essentially women's work, and glory. Yes, I know there have been physicists
like Yin Ih and molecular astronomers-I remember old Jane Rakadsalismyself, her wonderful
black, ageless face opening into a great smile! But somehow the disciplines of life seem more
congenial to most of us women.5 In 1962, when many colleges were still effectually segregated
by race and want ads were still separated by gender into male and female occupations,
Mitchison presents, as a matter of course, the participation of women of color in science. What
these utopian and science fiction writers offer, more importantly than portraits of individual
women scientists, is a revision of past and future science history that includes women as rightful
participants. In this way, they share a goal with feminist historians of science.
Etc cards