Hulu’s adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s dsytopic novel The Handmaid’s Tale (2017-2018, 1985) describes a world in which those who want to have children cannot and those who can are conscripted to a life in which they have no control over their reproduction: a handmaid is little more than a “womb on legs,” according to one character. Atwood’s novel draws on past practices—requiring a husband’s signature on a woman’s birth control pill prescription, for example—in order to imagine a future of extreme institutionalized misogyny. On the other end of the representational spectrum, BBC’s Call the Midwife draws on our contemporary moment, including debates over universal health care and concerns about the effects of poverty and the erosion of traditional “family values,” in order to imagine a utopic past in which the National Health Service provided comprehensive, compassionate reproductive health care to all who needed it. These two texts serve as touchstones for a paper in which I argue that depictions of reproductive autonomy or powerlessness reflect larger cultural anxieties regarding the role of government and the political in women and their family’s lives.
About the presenterSara Hosey
Sara Hosey holds a Ph.D. in American Literature from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and is the coordinator of the Women and Gender Studies Project and an associate professor of English at Nassau Community College. Her scholarly work has appeared in publications including the Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, Feminist Formations, and Feminist Teacher and she is currently developing a study of depictions of housewives and mothers in contemporary popular culture.