Date of Award
4-29-2020
Document Type
Honors Thesis
Department
English
First Advisor
Vanessa Corredera
Abstract
Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) and the Hulu award-winning televisual adaptation (2017-Present) portray a dystopic, theocratic regime known as Gilead. The regime’s focus on female bodies and reproduction exemplifies what feminist theorists call rape culture, a culture Gilead perpetuates through sexual violence, rape, and surveillance. Using critical race theory, media and close-textual analysis this project examines both works, arguing that complicity within the novel must be discussed in relation to rape culture and that while the series accounts for rape culture, it problematically manifests a type of feminism that privileges white women over women of color.
Recommended Citation
Gallant, Hannah, "The Blame Game : Complicity and Rape Culture in Margaret Atwood's Novel and Hulu's Adapted Series The Handmaid's Tale" (2020). Honors Theses. 240.
https://dx.doi.org/10.32597/honors/240/
https://digitalcommons.andrews.edu/honors/240
Subject Area
Atwood, Margaret, 1939- . Handmaid's tale; Rape in literature; Blame
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
DOI
https://dx.doi.org/10.32597/honors/240/