ABSTRACT
This article considers the allegorical potential of the dystopian narrative found within Hulu’s adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (Miller). The themes and setting of the show indicate essential action in the present and have motivated feminist and human rights activists to appropriate Handmaid robes in protest. Drawing in part on protester interviews, the chapter analyzes the use and function of dystopian texts such as The Handmaid’s Tale for political action from the perspective of gender, race, class and critical utopian studies. In declaring that “this is how it starts,” protesters frame their actions as preventing events that have, up until then, only occurred in fiction. As a result, these protests are frequently unwilling to consider strikingly similar historical instances of reproductive control that have been inflicted on Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC). The protests also nostalgically cling to a liberal past and present that must be protected at all costs. This disavowal of both racialized past events and possible post-capitalist future(s) ultimately restrict these protests from challenging broader structures of capital, white supremacy and reproductive control in the present.
