misuse of power/threat of violence

Question 1

Misuse of power via sexual violence

Answer 1

• Chapter 16, The Ceremony, misuse of power by commander + serena joy
• ‘fucking’ instead of ‘making love’
• ‘one detaches oneself.’ alienation from self and identity, removes offred from ‘I’, too painful.
• Job-like, pressure to complete job, horribly perverted, not described as rape, biblical precedent for Handmaids in novel, walking womb, only function is to procreate, form of state rape (not much of choice), duty to fulfill
• Context: Ceaușescu’s Romania: women’s bodies controlled, awarded Romanians for having many children, president of Romania, last Communist leader, made abortions illegal, created conditions in which birth defects proliferated, created conditions in which rape was almost incentivised.
• Orwell: W+J, ‘i wanted to rape you and then murder you’, Julia laughs
• misuse of power by party has perverted loving relationships, dehumanisation of women,
• Context: Nazi germany, mothers cross may 1939, mothers with four children got bronze, six got silver, eight got gold, SS forced to marry Aryan
• AO5: Patai ‘The view of women as inferior, and their simultaneous idealization as reproductive and sexual specialists’

Question 2

Extreme punishment

Answer 2

• Orwell: ministry of love, room 101
• attempt to subject to own worst nightmare to break down resistance
• cont: British and American governments; during the Second World War, the British Ministry of Food oversaw rationing (the name “Ministry of Food Control” was used in World War I) and the Ministry of Information restricted and controlled information, rather than supplying it; while, in the U.S., the War Department was abolished and replaced with the “National Military Establishment” in 1947 and then became the Department of Defense in 1949, right around the time that Nineteen Eighty-Four was published.
• Nazi concentration camps for political prisoners: 1933-45 over 500,000 non Jewish people were sent to camps for political crimes, severe deterrent to opposition
• ao5:
• THT: Chapter six, The Wall, Salvaging
• “we’re supposed to look” “they have committed atrocities, and must be made into examples”
• anal:
• cont:

Question 3

psychological violence