Killing Joy in Ustopian Gilead: Girlhood and Subversion in The Handmaid’s Tale “Media Franchise”

Abstract

This article explores the representations of girlhood introduced in the recent additions to The Handmaid’s Tale franchise: Bruce Miller’s 2017 Hulu series and Margaret Atwood’s 2019 novel The Testaments. Drawing on affect theory and girlhood studies, I analyze how the girls do not conform to the cultural expectations of ustopian Gilead but manage to challenge and contest them. Heterotopian spaces, where the girls are expected to undergo a process of self-transformation into stable identities, are employed by the nation to direct them towards their prescribed happiness markers. Sara Ahmed’s notion of the feminist killjoy is used as key mode of dissent that arises when the girls encounter the dissonance produced between the objects that are collectively imagined to cause happiness and how they are affected by them. I argue that, through Kathleen Stewart’s notion of ordinary affects and their liminal position as girls, they find radically joyful alternatives that clash with Gilead’s fixed prescriptions. This article analyzes three depictions of girlhood across media in The Handmaid’s Tale franchise, focusing on girlhood as a liminal category that empowers girls to become feminist killjoys to fulfill their own desires.