Dr Zuleyka Zevallos

#HandmaidsTale - As much as I enjoy watching about dystopias and thinking about them with a sociological lens, I really think this one misses the point in capturing how 'race'/'ethnicity' would play out in an extension of Gilead (which is basically Trump's America)

Black women and other women of colour have written about this extensively, for years, about the book and the TV adaptation It's not "Trump's America." Atwood uses history of what's happened to Black & Brown women under colonisation, erases race, & imagines it as White women

Thanks for clarifying Zuleyka, I haven't read the book - had no idea Atwood appropriated colonial stories in this way. I am told that in the book, the issue of 'race' wasn't dealt with at all. It appears this dystopian society removes 'race' as an issue between humans within.

Race in the novel is largely swept aside. Almost all dystopian fiction by White people is imagining how unfair slavery, dispossession and murder would be if it happened to White people. And POC mostly don't exist, plus there's the idea that all of humanity would unite...

...That means, actually, that Indigenous people will overlook centuries of dispossession, that Indigenous & other Black folk will forget slavery, that Brown folk will overlook imperial wars... to fight alongside White people. It's the perfect illustration of White supremacy

Yeah I see what you mean. I thought that maybe these were opportunities to look at issues of refugees/gender discrimination via different lens. But it encapsulates white supremacy via dystopian fiction. Now that explains the absence of 'race'

It's the exploitation of refugee stories, the appropriation of colonial history In the post apocalyptic world, Whiteness wins POC are somehow inexplicably extinct White people are enslaved White people rebel, survive & win the world As if slavery is so easy to unshackle