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“Not an instruction manual”: Environmental degradation, racial erasure, and the politics of abortion in The Handmaid's Tale (1985)
Women's Studies International Forum ( IF 1.5 ) Pub Date : 2020-05-15 , DOI: 10.1016/j.wsif.2020.102362
Christabelle Sethna

The Handmaid's Tale (1985), by Canadian author Margaret Atwood, features a reproductive dystopia called the Republic of Gilead that is set in a near-futuristic USA. However compelling, the association of the novel with the politics of abortion in the era of President Donald J. Trump has sidelined its temporal origins in the first term of Ronald Reagan's presidency and overshadowed the plot's hinge: a fertility decline triggered mainly by a series of ecological crises leads to the founding of the Republic of Gilead as a white supremacist, patriarchal, evangelical Christian, theocratic stronghold bent on improving the white birth rate. This backdrop is indebted to Atwood's own longstanding ecofeminist philosophy, which means that the novel is as much about Reagan-era abortion politics as it is about concerns over environmental degradation in the early 1980s. Approaching the novel along these parallel tracks provides ample opportunity to spotlight its real-life historical context, using it as a springboard to examine the plot's racial implications and the knock-on emergence of movements for environmental justice and reproductive justice, coming full circle to the Trump era.



中文翻译:

“非指导手册”:环境恶化,种族歧视以及《女仆的故事》(1985年)中的堕胎政治

女仆的故事(1985年)由加拿大作家玛格丽特·阿特伍德(Margaret Atwood)创作,描绘了一种生殖上的反乌托邦,称为吉利德共和国(Republic of Gilead),它坐落在一个近乎未来主义的美国。无论多么令人信服,唐纳德·J·特朗普总统时代小说与堕胎政治之间的联系在罗纳德·里根总统任期的第一任期间就已经将其短暂的起源置于边缘,并掩盖了情节的铰链:主要由于一系列因素导致的生育率下降生态危机导致吉利德共和国的建立是白人至上主义者,重男轻女,福音派基督教徒,神权统治据点,致力于改善白人出生率。这种背景应归功于阿特伍德(Atwood)长期以来的生态女性主义哲学,这意味着该小说既涉及里根时代的堕胎政治,也涉及对1980年代初期环境恶化的担忧。沿着这些平行的路径接触这本小说提供了充分的机会来凸显其现实生活的历史背景,并将其作为跳板来研究该情节的种族影响以及对环境正义和生殖正义运动的连锁反应,从而使小说成为现实。特朗普时代。

更新日期:2020-05-15
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