Your Handmaid Outfit is Performative and Racist
If you have never read Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, you may likely not know how it erased people of color from the conversation. The television series attempted to make amends, but the premise stayed very much the same. In the novel, handmaids, who were white women, were treated as slaves and black women disappeared. This left room for white women to utilize the novel as a backbone for performative activism. Such activism centers reproductive rights discussion around white plight and ignores the racial inequity of US reproductive care.
A Little Background
Atwood’s novel adapted its speculative fiction approach from existing laws and cultural realities present before and after Jim Crow era United States. During an interview with PBS, Atwood noted that she prefers to call her work “speculative fiction” instead of science fiction. Thus, Gilead isn’t a work of total imagination — there’s precedence for that world. It may not mirror the United States in its current form; its structure and customs also reflect aspects of 17th century New England Puritanism and dictatorships seen in different eras across the globe. In the interview, Atwood lists influences from her childhood such as Fahrenheit 451, Animal Farm and 1984. These novels take a Science Fiction approach to dystopian themes, some of which are rooted in Russian historical events and some in American ones.
In turn, Gilead, the dystopian hellscape in the novel and the series, is America. Atwood details the policies of Gilead on page 305: “Its racist policies, for instance, were firmly rooted in the pre-Gilead period, and racist fears provided some of the emotional fuel that allowed the Gilead takeover to succeed as well as it did.” This quote indicates, if this is speculative fiction, that the environment that allowed Gilead to come about was inherently racist. America and its policies were racist long before 1985, when the book was written, if you follow this line of reasoning. Atwood acknowledges these influences on her work and is genuine about pointing out these problematic systems that largely serve the patriarchy through gender and racial inequity.
The book is set in New England. Although Atwood is Canadian, she knowingly placed the book in America. The entire premise of the book is that a fundamentalist Christian regime rose to power as a response to a fertility crisis. The novel also indicates that that regime was able to be doubly racist by displacing the blame of a violent coup on “Islamic Fanatics’’. This has the convenient effect of denoting the inherent savagery of the Islamic faith and its predominantly colorful worshippers. Gilead has a clear way of differentiating classes by uniform and station in day-to-day life. Although it is not inherently stated, the undertone with this classification system reflects eerily on the way a historically racist regime, the Nazis in Germany, classified the undesirable elements of their society.
Costuming and Context
The now popularized handmaid outfits in the novel and the series are a way of removing cultural differences and ignoring the individual. Atwood’s handmaids were all white and it was very clear that their children would be the most desirable. In the series, there is a single handmaid of color who receives screen time. She escapes Gilead through a not-so-well disguised underground railroad style system to the North. In this case, the North is Canada where human rights still exist. At face value, the outfits seem to touch upon how the patriarchy places women under, categorically, the same oppression. However, the series erases key racial discourse in an area of activism that has historically also ignored women of color
Other cultures have utilized costuming, outfits, and clothing such as the Burqa to limit the attractiveness and individualism of women. Although the level of women’s coverage varies from culture to culture, the effect is the same. Perhaps you made the intellectual leap to assume the costumes served a similar purpose in The Handmaid’s Tale. However, Atwood clarified in the New York Times in 2017 that “the modesty costumes worn by the women of Gilead are derived from Western religious iconography — the Wives wear the blue of purity, from the Virgin Mary; the Handmaids wear red, from the blood of parturition, but also from Mary Magdalene. Also, red is easier to see if you happen to be fleeing.” Okay, and what does this mean? Why is the distinction important?
Atwood did not ignore the racial bias in Gilead’s rules and policies. In the novel and through interviews that reveal her research and influences, Atwood was forthright about the breeding policies being woefully racist. During an interview with Penguin, she discussed selective breeding as an influence for her work, showing the volumes of research she used to design the concept of the novel. Speaking of the rise of the religious right both globally and in the United States as a more focused microcosm, Atwood said she read a piece called “Why Nazis slaughtered own super-race babies” and went on to discuss how racially pure wives were given to men to create “super-race [children]…bred for looks and loyalty, stalwart, tall, blond-haired and blue-eyed”. Atwood was very aware of the racial influences she would be weaving into the novel and, subsequently aware, of the show’s treatment of the concepts. Does current activism utilizing the outfits and concepts of the novel acknowledge those key racial influences?
Color Blindness Is Not Inclusive
The handmaids are used as breeding stock by wealthy, influential families after a crisis that rendered most women infertile in Gilead. Handmaids were selected from predominantly white, well-educated backgrounds and forced to reproduce with their commanders. Realistically, at any point, you can substitute the word commander for master and it would effectively hold the same historical context.
Breeding of adult human females is nothing new for women of color in the United States. There is a long and well-known history of their selection by slave owners for forceful reproduction. The curtailing of reproductive rights, specifically for women of color, is deeply rooted in American history. According to a Vawnet briefing published in 2016, “…control of African-Americans’ reproductive choices dates back to 18th and 19th-century efforts to increase the slave population through procreative exploitation of enslaved women and continues today in the form of discriminatory welfare policies”. Where in the book or the series is this very specific struggle for women of color acknowledged as unique to them? The answer is, it isn’t.
The show attempts to bring some voices of color into the forefront through characters like Moira who is, initially, a handmaid of color. Moira flees to Canada. A woman of color seeking refuge in the North should not be an unfamiliar story if you know anything about American history. You see some of her struggle and her role as a black lesbian in Gilead as you follow her journey through peripheral breaks in the storyline. There is also a black Martha. Marthas in Gilead are housemaids and cooks, placing women firmly back into the domestic sphere. June’s husband is a black man. However, these characters seem to exist on the sidelines and their stories are positioned in such a way that they seem to rescue June in her cause or carry her plotline. The show always recenters on the white protagonist.
Performative Activism
The term is relatively new in the discussion, but performative activism has existed for decades. You might have heard the term Slacktivism, coined in 1995. Slacktivism was a way of participating in some form of activism without ever really doing the work. You could contribute a couple of bucks to a Go Fund Me or put a series of hashtags on a social media post to “participate”. Celebrities misused their Instagrams so badly in 2020 that their misplaced Black Lives Matter posts on Blackout Tuesday ruined the conversation. By definition, performative activism is “activism that is done to increase one’s social capital rather than because of one’s devotion to a cause”.
Good intentioned people’s actions can still have a negative connotation. While gaining visibility through the striking red and white modesty uniform might seem like a strong statement, it can also be seen by minorities as a way for predominantly white women to dominate the focus in the conversation. A unified, unrelenting group of women with a common and clear goal can change the world. That change should be for the good of all women and all women should be invited to the conversation and advocated for. If we are going to dismantle the patriarchy, collective radical intolerance and active refusal to participate are required.
