Nolite te Bastardes Carborundorum? Using Kylie Jenner and Reproductive Rights to Examine the Cultural Afterlife of The Handmaid’s Tale
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.29173/crossings179Keywords:
The Handmaid's Tale, Kylie Jenner, Reproductive Rights, Cultural Symbolism, Social MediaAbstract
Emerging from the shocking image of Kylie Jenner's 2019 Handmaid's Tale themed birthday party — in which women clad in red dresses and bonnets drank cocktails and celebrated — this paper analyzes the cultural afterlife of the Handmaid symbol from Margaret Atwood's celebrated novel The Handmaid's Tale. Spanning from Jenner's birthday celebration to abortion protests in Philadelphia, I begin by understanding how the Handmaid herself is conceived of by Atwood in the novel. Building from this literary analysis, I question all modern utilizations of the Handmaid symbol. In the same way that acts of resistance are subsumed by the tyrannical system in The Handmaid's Tale, I argue that contemporary deployments of the Handmaid symbol — whether for protest or not — have no lasting impact, as they are inevitably assimilated into the oppressive cultural from which they emerged.
![](https://crossingsjournal.ca/public/journals/1/submission_179_179_coverImage_en_US.png)
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2023 Olivia O'Neill
![Creative Commons License](http://i.creativecommons.org/l/by/4.0/88x31.png)
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.