Minor Lit Major Pet Peeve: People keep calling ACB / Barrett a "Handmaiden". She's not. She's one of the privileged Wives.
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"Aunts" are women who aren't fertile and aren't Wives, but have managed to convince the patriarchy to spare them by going full-fascist and being willing to torture and indoctrinate the Handmaidens.
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"Marthas" are women who are second-class citizens but who have useful skills and/or wouldn't make the kind of babies that the privileged class want for themselves. They're strongly suggested to be women of color since Gilead is a white supremacy.
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"Wives" are privileged women who are at the top of the womanly hierarchy. They have status, comfort, riches, and power over other women. They can abuse the Handmaidens and Marthas as they please. They are safe from prison, safe from sex captivity, safe from violence.
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They may not be HAPPY, in the way that any woman married to a man in a patriarchal system may not be happy, but they do have power and wealth and comfort and safety beyond the dreams of other women.
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ACB / Barrett is a Wife in the Gilead system. She would never be forced to carry a baby she doesn't want to carry to term. She would never suffer in the way that queer women will be made to suffer. She could abuse other women with impunity, safe from any reprisal.
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This is important, because ACB / Barrett will never be endangered by any of her rulings, no matter how much the rest of us suffer. Handmaidens are what OTHER people are, not her. She is a member of the privileged elite, safe even as she strips our rights away.
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"Handmaiden" is, in Gilead, a pretty name dressing up ugly brutalization. I suspect it's also why her religious group uses the word "Handmaid", because it sounds pretty and old-timey and down to earth and folksy. Like "Goody". But she's a member of the elite.
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Anyway, I don't call her "Serena Joy" either (one of the Wives in Atwood's book) because it's cutesy and niche and I don't really think Atwood needs to be MORE a part of this conversation.
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I call her ACB or Barrett because that's her name. *shrugs* While I have you here and you're all linking that Forbes article at me: Atwood was probably not inspired by ACB's religious group when she wrote the book.https://www.vox.com/culture/21453103/amy-coney-barrett-handmaids-tale-supreme-court …
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"Tom Deignan found that the story didn’t hit the AP until after The Handmaid’s Tale came out in 1985, meaning that Atwood couldn’t have pulled the word “handmaid” from that mythical news article after all."
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"The reason there’s so much confusion about exactly where she took the word handmaid from is that handmaid is the kind of word a lot of North American charismatic Christian groups were into in 1984: suggestive of purity, duty, and feminine obedience to divine will."
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Atwood herself has said that it wasn't PoP that inspired her: "In a Sept. 23, 2020, interview with UC Santa Cruz, she said the group did not serve as an inspiration for the book: “It wasn’t them. It was a different one but the same idea,” she said."https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/amy-barrett-handmaids-tale/ …
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I am doubtful we can lay to rest the myth that ACB inspired the Handmaid's Tale because of how these things spread, but even within the framework of Gilead she's not a Handmaiden. She's a Wife: privilege, power, and safety.
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Before one more person tells me "Folks aren't calling her Handmaid because of the famous book and famous show, but rather because it's a term her niche religious group no longer uses", I see it deployed alongside things like "Ofdonald" and "Aunt Lydia", I.e., book references.
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A note for people scolding me for using "ACB":https://twitter.com/ElieNYC/status/1314643324788183041?s=19 …
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End of conversation
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