https://doi.org/10.67147/literariness.v1i2.094
Lives Held in Suspension: Biopolitics and Sexual Governance in The Handmaid’s Tale
SHARIKA P.V.
Independent Researcher
Abstract: Michel Foucault conceptualizes biopower as a mechanism of power operating through the regulation of bodies, sexuality, health, and reproduction, and biopolitics as the domain in which biopower operates. Biopolitics involves the strategies and policies that govern not only life but also the bodies of a society’s subjects. Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale is a compelling site to examine such biopolitical conditions, as in Gilead, rather than exclusive corporal or capital punishment, governance operates largely through the suspension of lives. This paper, by analysing the lives of Handmaids, Marthas, Jezebels, Queers, and other governed subjects in the novel, examines how people are categorized, conditioned, and controlled in Gilead, where power is exercised through permanent suspension rather than outright exclusion. This study, foregrounding the concept of biopolitics (Foucault) and extending the concepts of liminality (Victor Turner), bare life (Giorgio Agamben), and subalternity (Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak), advances the term Societal Limbo to explore dimensions not fully addressed by these existing concepts, particularly the condition of people who are either legally embedded yet socially erased or socially embedded yet legally suspended. By reading Atwood’s novel alongside its television adaptation, the study demonstrates how biopolitical power facilitates prolonged suspension rather than temporary exclusion or permanent rejection.
Keywords: Biopolitics, Biopower, The Handmaid’s Tale, Liminality, Bare Life, Societal Limbo, Foucault
Read Full Manuscript PDF