2023-07-24 22:22:14
Gilead, the setting in which the fiction of The Handmaid’s Tale takes place, is an open-air prison where flayed corpses hang that years ago committed sins that no one remembers anymore.
In that dystopian universe imagined by the Canadian Margaret Atwood –it had its first literary version in 1985 and became an unusual global success from its television adaptation, by Hulu Films, in 2018–, the ultra-Catholic, hyper-violent and macho State despises women.
The panorama is terrifying: in the near future, in which the birth rate has dropped considerably due to climate change, society is divided into castes and fertile women –the “maids” that give meaning to the title– are subjected to systematic rapes and forced to bear the children of government commanders, whose wives cannot have children.
Reduced to the status of fertile females, they are forced to serve a dictatorial regime that annuls them and, if they resist, annihilates them.
In any case, those boys who give birth are reassigned to the families of the ruling caste, which transmits to the offspring what it considers its primary values.
It will not be surprising at this point that, as she herself admits, the author was inspired for her fiction by the Argentine dictatorship: pure imagination could hardly have matched the horrifying reality of the torture, theft and appropriation of babies.
In fiction, women also give birth to children that are taken from them and they cannot raise them.
“One of my sources for The Handmaid’s Tale was Argentina under the government of the generals: so many women murdered and their children stolen,” admitted the author, who in addition to being a novelist is a feminist militant and human rights activist.
In 2020, when the fight for the right to legal abortion took to the streets in Argentina –in a swing, then inverse, between dystopia and history–, the feminist collectives appropriated the wardrobe of the series to show it off in powerful, silent and choreographic marches, which were replicated in parallel throughout the world: Belgium, Poland, England, Ireland, Croatia, the United Arab Emirates. The clamor for the extension of rights over one’s own body.
Now, in the midst of Javier Milei’s escalation, reality once again seems to surpass fiction: in the mouth of the “libertarian”, that idea reverberates that at this point -and already outside the Middle Ages and literary dystopias- reminds us that fascism can modify its clothing but in essence it is always the same: “A woman can choose about her body, but what she has inside her womb is not her body, it is another individual”, he judges.
Exhibiting the same unheard-of reasoning with which she expressed in an interview with O Globo 2021 that girls who are raped should not have an abortion (“it is a murder aggravated by the relationship”) and declared herself “totally against” the right to voluntary termination of pregnancy, Milei anticipates that if she were to become President, she could repeal the law enacted in 2020 – an initiative already exposed by her candidate for vice-president and current national deputy Victoria Villarruel–; as well as eliminate the Ministry of Women , Gender and Diversity… in a country that registers a femicide every 28 hours.
It also proposes to cancel Comprehensive Sexual Education (ESI) classes, which prevent many abuses. He reimagines women as potential servants–not to say slaves–of men. A position that –oh, coincidence– reaches its maximum reactionary expression with denialist positions, in relation to the crimes of the last dictatorship.
The presidential candidate -who, shouting “lefties are afraid”, summoned a crowd at this year’s Book Fair-, describes the women’s and human rights movements as a “cult of a gender ideology” and judges that “the word ‘murder’ makes them uncomfortable”, ignoring the fact that, if abortion were abortion, it would send these women to jail. Not even Atwood dared so much.
The Canadian writer had already taken the trouble to express her position in the midst of the legal abortion debate: “No one likes abortion, even when it is safe and legal. It’s not what any woman would choose to party on a Saturday night, she posited. But no one likes women bleeding to death in a bathroom from an illegal abortion either. To do? Perhaps a different way of approaching the answer would be to ask, what kind of country do you want to live in? In one in which each individual is free to make decisions concerning his or her health and body, or in one in which half the population is free and the other half is enslaved?
What would Atwood say, in the face of the anti-rights barrage, or if he saw Milei rule?
In Argentina, even science fiction –and horror– stories sometimes fall short.
The kingdom of Gilead, a bean.
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