gender role theme Flashcards
society
Gilead is a strictly hierarchical society, with a huge difference between the genders
all women fired from their jobs and have their bank accounts drained when Gilead takes over
Luke
he doesn’t seem so furious as Offred becomes dependent on him
suggests that even good men have embedded misogynistic attitudes- Gilead merely takes these views to the logical extreme
women in power
Aunt Lydia may be in a position of power but she is only allowed a cattle prod, not even a gun
Commander’s wife
once a powerful supporter of far right-wing religious ideas about how women should stay in the home- now finds herself unhappily trapped
sexual violence
Gilead institutionalises sexual violence toward women. The ceremony is institutionalised adultery and a kind of rape
Jezebel’s- whorehouse for the social elite
critiques religious right
it also shows the feminist left- Offred’s mother
still not the solution
fault the commanders wife
for not showing solidarity to her gender and rebelling against Gilead
passive power
“I enjoy the power; the power of a dog bone, passive but there”
erotic boredom
“maybe boredom is erotic, when women do it for men”
divisions in gender
Gilead has caused divisions that make women hate each other as Offred recalls Aunt Lydia saying that the Wives of the Commanders will hat ethe Handmaids and that the Handmaid’s should be empathetic
Freud’s theory of ‘Penis Envy’
“Pen Is Envy, Aunt Lydia would say”
Offred’s envy of the Commander’s position and power
this book is
a story of “a woman’s survival narrative told within the confines of a patriarchal society” called Gilead - Coral Ann Howells
the HMT offers
an explicit feminist critique of the objectifying male gaze and the binary logic that undergird’s patriarchal society
influence by
events in Iran and Afghanistan - theocracy and diminished civil liberties, especially for women
handmaids are
depersonalized and exploited as reproductive tools
“national resource”
