[Este artículo existe en castellano. Pulsa aquí para leerlo]
I refuse to refer to The Handmaid's Tale as a dystopia. The only reason why someone can be inclined to regard this show that way is because they are watching from a Western(ised) perspective: the action is situated in the West, where many assume its inhabitants to be far away from the dangers portrayed. But such dangers as fundamentalism taking control of society in the face of a crisis, women charged with the weight of preserving what are supposed to be the core traditions of a community, LGTBQ+ people persecuted and killed, females obliged to comply with their “biological destiny”, systematic rapes, fugitives trying desperately to cross a border to be safe from physical, psychological or mortal harms (many of them carrying their kids), parents and children separated, etc., not only are happening right now in many parts of the world, but are happening in the West itself — perhaps in less obvious and systematic ways, perhaps in broad daylight but suffered by non-Westerners or those so conceived.
If this show can feel so shocking for us Westerners, it is because those who suffer on screen are considered part of us by most of us; us as opposed to them, the others; us as opposed to those who normally suffer such situations and are assumed to have been born for them. It feels shocking because of our immersion in the pernicious dichotomy of us and the others, on the basis of which people born by pure luck in a territory (for instance, in a not-so-random example, Spanish and Italian territories), feel more entitled to have rights or even a life than those born beyond the other shore (to continue with my not-so-random example, than those born beyond the South of the Mediterranean sea). This dichotomy, by the way, can clearly, and perhaps should, be formulated in terms of class difference, but that’s a story for another post.
For me, part of the interest in The Handmaid’s Tale lies in its rupture with the dichotomy just mentioned, the very rupture that takes the show out of the classification as a dystopia. It may feel like a dystopia from American(ised) and European(ised) eyes, but this, folks, is OUR reality, whether we like it or not.
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