The biopower and biopolitics concepts and reflections of them on women in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale

Abstract

Considering both Michel Foucault’s disciplinary, bio-power, and biopolitics concepts, I will support Atwood insights about women’s growing subjugation and argue with relevant examples from the novel that in the near future, the family unit will be torn apart by power relations under the control of an oppressive regime and neoconservative ideology. With the rising neoliberal and neoconservative ideologies all around the world, people have begun to lose their hopes in bright futures and felt the bell jar over their heads in the 21st century. Margaret Atwood began to carry the banner for feminist dystopias with The Handmaid’s Tale, written in 1985. In a country called Gilead, ruled by a totalitarian regime, women are considered slaves who perform certain inferior tasks and exist in order to give birth to healthy ubermensch babies for Commanders. In creating this dystopian world, Atwood emphasizes the deformation in society and establishes a hierarchy system in which women are objectified, and marginalized. In this way, she shows the reader how a patriarchal society is shaped through fiction and Atwood criticizes all institutions in their own way. The Handmaid’s Tale, as an important example of feminist dystopian literature, reveals women’s future struggle for freedom and the oppression they will be subjected to, and Atwood meticulously narrates their story. This novel by Atwood holds a mirror to the political and social problems of our time, leading readers to ponder and question the future within the framework of a dystopian universe.