Margaret Atwood's dystopic fiction and the contradictions of neoliberal freedom

Abstract

Margaret Atwood's MadAddam trilogy marks an emergent literary critique of neoliberalism which has emerged over the last 25 years, primarily in dystopian and science fiction. Rather than calling out neoliberalism for a hyporcitical statism, or for creating a kind of unfreedom all to easily envisioned as dictatorship, she shows us the tyranny inherent in its utopian idea of freedom, which ultimately restricts human action through diffuse channels based in quotidian realms. As such, the trilogy parts company with the earlier antifascist analytic that marked her earlier work The Handmaid's Tale. While affirming the didactic value of speculative fiction as a means of contesting neoliberal utopianism, this article also contends that if one takes Atwood's critiques too literally, they – like the wider popular tendency they inscribe – cause us to underestimate the continued importance of the centralised nation-state in maintaining capitalist social relations.