Nolite te Bastardes Carborundorum? Using Kylie Jenner and Reproductive Rights to Examine the Cultural Afterlife of The Handmaid’s Tale

Abstract

Emerging from the shocking image of Kylie Jenner's 2019 Handmaid's Tale themed birthday party — in which women clad in red dresses and bonnets drank cocktails and celebrated — this paper analyzes the cultural afterlife of the Handmaid symbol from Margaret Atwood's celebrated novel The Handmaid's Tale. Spanning from Jenner's birthday celebration to abortion protests in Philadelphia, I begin by understanding how the Handmaid herself is conceived of by Atwood in the novel. Building from this literary analysis, I question all modern utilizations of the Handmaid symbol. In the same way that acts of resistance are subsumed by the tyrannical system in The Handmaid's Tale, I argue that contemporary deployments of the Handmaid symbol — whether for protest or not — have no lasting impact, as they are inevitably assimilated into the oppressive cultural from which they emerged.