ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the gendered treatment of bodies and the environment and the attempts to control both depicted in feminist science fiction of climate change. Analyzing the dystopian worlds of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale(1985), Phyllis Gotlieb’s Birthstones (2007), and N.K. Jemisin’s The Fifth Season (2015), it illustrates how societies in these novels invoke the recurrent themes of survival and imperiled reproduction as pretext to appropriate the bodies of women and racial others for communal resources, all the while usurping female agency, mothering, and the very families they ostensibly seek to protect. Thus, this chapter demonstrates that patriarchal responses to climate change can be as devastating as the environmental disasters they attempt to redress.
