Breaking silence, bearing witness, and voicing defiance: the resistant female voice in the transmedia storyworld of The Handmaid’s Tale

ABSTRACT

With the recent success of HULU’s video-on-demand adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale and widespread use of its imagery by political action groups like the Handmaid Coalition, The Handmaid’s Tale has become a transmedia property whose dystopian storyworld extends beyond the bounds of any single text. Spanning old and new media, the fictional and real, its storyworld, the Gileadverse, is comprised of authorized entertainment products, as well as fan-produced texts and activist performances. Considering the 1985 novel, 1990 film, HULU’s 2017–18 adaptation, as well as fan productions and activism, this paper surveys the transmedia shape of the Gileadverse, focusing on how this storyworld is unified by a thematic concern with the resistant female voice.

KEYWORDS:

• Dystopia
• Gileadverse
• The Handmaid’s Tale
• transmedia
• activism
• voice

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

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Amanda Howell

Amanda Howell is a Senior Lecturer in screen studies in the School of Humanities, Languages and Social Science, Griffith University. Her research focuses on gender and genre, especially in American screen media; her most recent major work is the monograph, A Different Tune: Popular Film Music and Masculinity in Action (Routledge 2015). Recently, she has co-edited (with B. Buchan and M. Gibson) a themed section of Cultural Studies Review entitled The Ethics of Troubled Images (2018). She is also co-editor (with L. Baker and R. Kumar) of the Special Issue, Beyond Nostalgia: Difference and Discomfort in Stranger Things (forthcoming in Refractory: Journal of Entertainment Media, 2019).