Document Type
Article
Abstract
This essay explores the dehumanizing potential of metaphors used to describe women’s reproductive biology through literary analysis of Margaret Atwood’s canonical feminist novel The Handmaid’s Tale (1985). Attending to the rhetoric that both justifies and contests ritualized rape and forced surrogacy in Atwood’s novel, this essay begins by interrogating the ubiquitous cultural and biomedical metaphors that reduce women and pregnant people to their bodies’ reproductive potential. The first section draws from scholarship in medical anthropology, medical rhetoric, and literary studies to illuminate how gendered stereotypes pervade biomedical, cultural, and legal representations of reproduction, reifying the conflation of women and people who can become pregnant with their reproductive biology. The essay’s second section applies an ecofeminist lens to The Handmaid’s Tale to consider the consequences of this metaphorization amid a simultaneously environmental and public health crisis. The novel renders biomedical metaphors of women’s bodies as reproductive machines literal by legally classifying fertile women as “national resources” within a patriarchal capitalist economy, a dehumanizing abstraction that permits the State first to commodify, then to commandeer and equitably distribute fertile women in the name of public health and ecological crisis management. When considered from this angle, The Handmaid’s Tale inspires closer attention to figurative language’s real-world impact on health law and policy, particularly in moments of environmental catastrophe and political unrest.
Recommended Citation
Rachel Conrad Bracken, More Than Merely "Two-legged Wombs": Lessons on Metaphor and Body Politics from Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale (1985), 15 ConLawNOW 115 (2024)