Gender and Sexuality – “Grab them by the pussy”: The Sexual Politics of Touch in The Handmaid’s Tale and Contemporary American Culture

“Grab them by the pussy”: The Sexual Politics of Touch in The Handmaid’s Tale and Contemporary American Culture

Sales of Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tale, originally published in 1985, soared in the run up to the 2016 U.S. election, featuring on numerous best sellers lists that year and the next. Countless journalists and news outlets attributed the novel’s resurgent popularity to its eerie timeliness, particularly regarding its depiction of the systemic and endemic oppression of women. The first season of the Hulu television adaptation was in mid-production during the election and Atwood has noted how those involved in the production woke up following Donald Trump’s win to find “our show has just been framed.” In this paper, I explore how a hate-fuelled and divisive climate is played out and challenged in The Handmaid’s Tale adaptation (Hulu, 2017-) through what I refer to as the sexual politics of touch. In the drama, the regulation of touch becomes a controlling mechanism enforcing passivity and compliance. I consider how the television adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale explores the politics of women’s sexual agency through the act of touch, an act that has unquestionably become more politically charged in the wake of #MeToo and #TimesUp. With the spotlight on female oppression and unequal gender power relations, we are palpably experiencing a reconfiguration of the shape, texture and sense of touch that is not rewriting but reframing earlier acts of touch. I consider here how the act of touching and being touched as depicted in The Handmaid’s Tale is made all the more powerful when considered in the context of the Trump era and the brash, aggressive and handsy physicality that characterizes Trump’s performance of politics.

Dr Donna Peberdy is Associate Professor of Performance, Sex and Gender and University Research Lead for Media, Culture and the Arts at Solent University, UK. She is the author of Masculinity and Film Performance: Male Angst in Contemporary American Cinema (Palgrave Macmillan 2011) and co-editor of Tainted Love: Screening Sexual Perversion (I.B. Tauris 2017). Donna is co-director of the Screening Sex project (screeningsex.com), series co-editor of the Screening Sex book series for Edinburgh University Press and co-convenor of the Screening Sex BAFTSS special interest group.