For the past five years, women across the globe have donned scarlet cloaks and white bonnets as a symbol of their fight for reproductive freedom. The titular handmaids from Margaret Atwood’s influential feminist dystopian novel, “The Handmaid’s Tale,” took on an unprecedented new legacy following former President Donald J. Trump’s 2016 electoral win. The novel’s depiction of a theocratic dictatorship echoed the regression of women’s rights by legislation that endangered many of the civil liberties and hard-fought women’s rights.

It is in the eerie similarities between the reproductive totalitarianism of Atwood’s fictional realm of Gilead and modern-day U.S. are where most of the cultural significance of Atwood’s novel lies. Consequently, the novel surged back to the top of bestseller lists during the week of Trump’s inauguration, two whole months before Hulu would go on to release the first episode of their highly anticipated adaptation of Atwood’s 1985 novel.

Since the first season of the TV show’s release, the global landscape of reproductive rights has irrevocably changed. From ICE detention centers forcibly sterilizing migrants to the Human Life Protection Act in Alabama looking to impose a near-total ban on abortions, the fight for reproductive liberation is more important now than ever before. Although Atwood’s novel is undoubtedly a critical work that has transgressed from a work of fiction into a cardinal product of social and political critique, there lies a key issue with the discourse surrounding the text. 

By positioning “The Handmaid’s Tale'' as infallible—both the book and the series—to the extent we have, we risk overlooking the complex and varied reproductive issues that affect marginalized peoples worldwide. It is hard to watch the brutalities that befall the women of “The Handmaid’s Tale” without noticing the striking comparisons to the historical exploitation of Black women. 

“By centering the experience of white victimhood at the heart of trauma narratives, particularly experiences of gender-based violence and reproductive issues, we involuntarily diminish the experiences of other women who may be disproportionately affected.”

We watch the protagonist Offred endure rape, brutalization, enslavement, and having her child snatched from her. These experiences unsettlingly mirror those that women and people of color have survived throughout America’s horrific history. While the show gives credence to how the new state of Gilead differentiates and abuses queer men and women, it fails to flesh out the place of women of color in the system. Meanwhile, the novel sees Black people sent “back” to Africa and Jewish people sent to Israel. The few people of color in the book become “Marthas,” working as maids and cooks for the white and socioeconomically elite. It is hard to envisage that Gilead’s hierarchical social structure looks to single out queer women, but women of color are fully integrated into this new class system with no sign of distinction. A somehow fully totalitarian patriarchal yet post-racial theocracy cannot help but make Atwood’s world incomplete and too far removed from reality.

The mistreatment of women of color, however, is still a terrifyingly prevalent issue today that needs to be swiftly addressed. Atwood has always noted the comparisons between her novel and “real life,” stating that when she wrote “The Handmaid’s Tale,” “nothing went into it that had not happened in real life somewhere at some time. The reason I made that rule is that I didn’t want anybody saying, ‘You certainly have an evil imagination, you made up all these bad things.’ I didn’t make them up.” Yet the present discourse surrounding women’s reproductive rights is completely inextricable from the conversation surrounding racial politics. 

A 2021 report established that Black women are four times more likely to die during pregnancy and childbirth in the U.K., and women from Asian ethnic backgrounds are twice as likely. This significant inequality can be attributed to several factors, primarily the lack of access to care for women of lower socioeconomic articles. But systemic racism is so deeply ingrained in the medical sector that “basically, black women are undervalued,” explains Ana Langer of Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and the director of the Woman and Health initiative. “[Black women] are not monitored as carefully as white women are. When they do present with symptoms, they are often dismissed.”

What we see so prevalently throughout “The Handmaid’s Tale” television and book series is white feminism and the failure to adequately address the distinct forms of oppression faced by ethnic minority women and other marginalized women. By centering the experience of white victimhood at the heart of trauma narratives, particularly experiences of gender-based violence and reproductive issues, we involuntarily diminish the experiences of other women who may be disproportionately affected. 

This critique of Atwood’s work is not to diminish its cultural resonance of women worldwide but to expose the dangers of creating an infallible legacy surrounding works of fiction and the limitations of fiction itself. However, the reproductive dystopian literary subgenre has come into its own, no doubt thanks to “The Handmaid’s Tale.” Novels like Leni Zumas’s “Red Clocks,” which explores a speculative world in which abortion and IVF are outlawed, and Joanne Ramos’s “The Farm,” which offers a socio-economic critique by intertwining the issues of gender, class, and race in her narrative exploring the role of surrogates in the Philippines, are filling the gaps which Atwood’s novel has left. 

Ramos’s book eerily evokes the current surrogacy industry in India, estimated to be worth nearly a billion pounds. With few rules and regulations on surrogate labor, the job is a strange, surreal occupation that completely rewrites our understanding of motherhood. Surrogate mother S Sumathi said, “I've always wondered if the baby is like any of my other children. I really do miss the baby and would give anything to see it once. I know it's not my baby after all, but I know that if I'd seen the baby, I wouldn't have given it away.” In ways that “The Handmaid’s Tale” simply doesn’t have the scope to do, “The Farm” explores how race and class are inextricable from the role of the surrogate. Turning to the literature and social critique of the future, we can expect to see tales that explore reproductive rights from a more holistic and intersectional perspective.

“By viewing these works of fiction not as dystopic, but as paratopic, the exploration of the political, social, and cultural aspects of reproductive rights in literature is recontextualized as discourse on the future of fundamental human rights.”

We have the work and research of Professor Kimberlé Crenshaw to thank for coining the term “intersectionality” and radically changing our approach to how we view intergroup feminist differences. Women who are adversely affected by race, (dis)ability, sexuality, gender nonconformity, class, and other such factors are often removed from the conversation of women’s rights entirely. Crenshaw explains, “In the context of violence against women, this elision of difference in identity politics is problematic, fundamentally because the violence that many women experience is often shaped by other dimensions of their identities, such as race and class.” It is this line of thinking that the current generation of reproductive dystopian authors like Zumas and Ramos hope to explore. 

Although there are undoubtedly theoretical gaps in Atwood’s world building, “The Handmaid’s Tale” has created a literary legacy that has spawned a generation of advocates challenging conventional attitudes to reproductive control and a literary subgenre in and of itself. What these works of speculative fiction offer is an insightful look at the world as it may come to be, but more importantly, a magnified focus of many of the horrors women and mothers have already had to endure. Zumas also drew on the parallels between her work and the decline of reproductive rights and bodily autonomy that women in the U.S. are now facing. She refers to her work as “not a dystopia, but a paratopia,” using the Greek prefix para for “near” or “around.” With this suggestion, Zumas seems to capture Atwood’s sentiment that her work was inspired by the real-life horrors women and mothers may face. Yet with a greater focus on intersectionality, the reproductive dystopian novels of the future may be closer to a paratopia than Atwood could have ever conceived of during the 1980s.

By viewing these works of fiction not as dystopic, but as paratopic, the exploration of the political, social, and cultural aspects of reproductive rights in literature is recontextualized as discourse on the future of fundamental human rights. Within the context of a global crisis for reproductive autonomy, paratopic literature is crucial in informing wider discourse surrounding the future of humanity. 

Image credit: Handmaid’s Tale at the Boston Women’s March, Kai Medina, 2019 (Wikimedia Commons | CC BY-SA 4.0))