Composing the Handmaid: From Graphic Novel to Protest Icon

Abstract

This article takes as its starting point Renee Nault’s recent adaptation of Margaret Atwood's 1985 novel The Handmaid’s Tale into comics form and asks, how is the handmaid composed? The red cloak and white headdress of the fertility slaves in Atwood’s dystopian novel make manifest Simone de Beauvoir’s famous observation that one is not born but becomes woman. Reading Nault’s text within the framework of Cultural Legal Studies, this article suggests that constructions of gender, including legal constructions of gender, are never simple or unproblematic. As law and comics scholarship suggests, the “cross-discursivity” of the comics form allows us to think about the ways in which knowledge production and representation can be contested and expanded. Reading the figure of the female protester who appears dressed in the handmaid’s uniform in a similar way allows us to see how law seeks to narrowly construe gender, and the multivalent reality it seeks to exclude within its own framing practices.