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Centre for Law and the Humanities Seminar with Professor Bill MacNeil (University of Queensland). Under His Eye: Feminine In/Visibilities in the Handmaid's Tale. Birkbeck Central Room 406.

When: —
Venue: Birkbeck Central

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Précis/Abstract: One of the most paradoxical – and chilling – features of the recent televisual adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s dystopian classic, The Handmaid’s Tale, is the in/visibility of the feminine. Nowhere more so than with the figure of the Old Testament-inspired ‘handmaid’, rendered, at one and the same time, hyper-visible as a group, yet, equally, utterly invisible as an individual, both by virtue of the striking pillar-box red habit, offset and accentuated by its snow-white wimple. A body, as it were, wrapped in theological signs, hidden and revealed by the triumph of religion. Despite this doubleness, or, in fact, precisely because of it, the phantasy of La Femme – ‘The Woman’ – not only exists but is omnipresent in Gilead. Which why a woman is always being beaten under Gilead’s theonomic sway – or raped, or mutilated, or killed. For the ‘Law’ which the ‘Divine Republic’ promulgates is that of an omnipresent ‘Eye’ that is ever watchful, always looking for and absolutely fixated upon that most sublime of imaginary part-objects, the maternal phallus. This paper will examine the highly contested status of the in/visible feminine in The Handmaid’s Tale, utilising a psychoanalytic frame to draw out the differences, but also the astonishing similarities – around faith, the future and the fetishised figure of the child – that obtain between Gilead and contemporaneity, with all of their shared anxieties about ‘end times’.

Contact name: Patrick Hanafin

Speakers
  • PROFESSOR BILL MACNEIL —

    Bio: Prof William P MacNeil, FAAL is an Honorary Professor of Law, The University of Queensland (Australia), a Visiting Professor at Birkbeck University of London (UK), an Adjunct Professor of the School of Law & Society, University of the Sunshine Coast (Australia), a Distinguished Fellow of the Legal Theory Lab, University of Westminster (UK), and an Adjunct Professor of Law, Victoria University (Australia). MacNeil is the author of Lex Populi: The Jurisprudence of Popular Culture and Novel Judgements: Legal Theory as Fiction. He is also a Co-Managing Editor of Pólemos: Journal of Law, Literature and Culture, a Senior Editorial Consultant for Legalities; The Australian and New Zealand of Journal of Law and Society, and the Editor of the Edinburgh Critical Series in Law, Literature and the Humanities.

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