![]() ![]() Their contrasting strategies say a lot about what makes a dystopia work.Ĭhristina Dalcher’s newly released Vox (no relation) imagines a world in which women are fitted with mandatory bracelets that electrocute them if they say more than 100 words a day. Meanwhile, Hulu’s TV adaptation has struggled to expand past Atwood’s source material and make her ideas about the ’80s relevant to today. ![]() Over the past year, two new novels have come out that attempt to follow in The Handmaid’s Tale’s footsteps and position themselves as the feminist dystopias of the Trump era. In the Trump era, we’ve been scrambling to come up with a fictional way to grapple with our structural misogyny that’s as effective as The Handmaid’s Tale. It suggested that the ideology that would allow such a world to come to pass was already more than present in our own world. The Handmaid’s Tale exaggerated the undertones of American Puritanism that were ascendant during the Reagan era into an imagined totalitarian theocracy, one in which women were treated as chattel and forced into lives of sexual slavery. When Margaret Atwood first published The Handmaid’s Tale in 1985, she was working with one of literary fiction’s most effective ways of looking at how misogyny is baked into the structures of our society: the feminist dystopia. ![]()
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