"Blessed be the fight": Political radicalism and gender oppression in Margaret Atwood's "The Handmaid's Tale" and "The Testaments"

The present thesis is a multidisciplinary study with two main objectives. Firstly, it aims to define the fictional Republic of Gilead from Margaret Atwood's novels The Handmaid's Tale and The Testaments as a totalitarian, fascist regime, and contextualize it among the historical precedents from the WW2 and Cold War era. Secondly, it discusses the implementation and outcomes of various violative laws culminating with capital punishments in Gilead, through the often-overlooked male experience. The first chapter scrutinises the formative years of Gilead. Foucault's concept of "governmentality" helps to define some of Gilead's apparatuses, including the death penalty, which is critiqued through Foucault and Derrida; desubjectification and depoliticisation as argued in Arendt's various works; and the Handmaids' formation in conjecture with Kristeva's "abjection". The second chapter investigates the "later-term" and the second generation of Gilead via Foucault's "power/knowledge" and "biopolitics". Using the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, an in-depth study of Gilead's language reveals its influence on the Gileadean subjects' dispositions. The third chapter analyses the societal structure of Gilead through Bentham and Foucault's elaborations on panoptic models. Supplementarily, Foucault's elucidation of norms defines the methods for the divided social fabric of Gilead. The chapter also references various sources on male victimhood and its invisibility in critical studies and history. Moreover, Arendt's report on Eichmann's trial and Atwood's own remarks provide in-depth perspectives into the victimization of Gileadean men and the double-sided nature of the women as victim-victimizers.