So, I watched through the 4 first episodes last night. Some random thoughts:
I find the flashbacks really intriguing but also super frustrating. As in, how did that world get to this? I don’t remember enough of the world building in the book to quite figure out what’s happening, but I find myself really curious about the mechanics of the coup, which I think presupposes a particular kind of gendered alliance across other social fractures (like class and race), but also presupposes a homogeneity to the United States that I don’t think is there? Can someone remind me whether Gilead is just New England, or whether that’s the broader US?
There are points where the show’s 1980s feminism sort of shows, in that race is not a dividing line (and class is also sort of skirted around).
I think the dynamic between Ofred and Serena is probably one of the most interesting aspects of the show. From the book, we know that Serena — and women like her — have helped usher this particular world into being, but are now being completely sidelined by the very thing they fought for. With Serena, the way she’s played feels to me so similar to Cersei from GOT — that seething rage just below the surface at her own powerlessness. The main difference is that Cersei was born into that system, whereas Serena actually helped produce it. So I guess I’m interested in the shades of complicity that the show is exploring: for example, I find the Aunties loathsome, but they seem to be simply sadistic religious zealots animated by a very authoritarian, vindictive reading of the Old Testament that got cherry picked to maximize the oppressive message. But Serena is a different kind of creature — is the idea that women like her were complicit with the coup in a (mistaken) bid to maximize their own power and social authority, a complicity that then backfired? And if so, does she buy into the ideology?
Not so shocking when you consider that animals in the meat and dairy industry are routinely subjected to this kind of abuse. I mean, I know this story isn’t about animal rights, but as mentioned above, it comes down to this.
I agree. These are not separate processes though — reducing humans to “bare” animality has been at the heart of all sorts of 20th and 21st century projects of power (think concentration or detension camps for the most obvious example). But if you want to think with industrial ag, I don’t know if the allegory of Ofred’s reduction to her reproductive function is actually animalization — I think that analogy is a little bit off. This isn’t the paradigm within which this world operates: otherwise you’d see mass confinement & artificial insemination, along with all sorts of eugenic logics of breeding the best stock and maximization. Whereas here you’re seeing this really complicated relationship to surrogacy mediated by religious dogma.