Out now the paper Le Ancelle e noi. Immaginario, distopia e corpo delle donne nell’ecosistema
narrativo di The Handmaid’s Tale [The handmaids and Us. Imaginary, dystopia and women’s body in The Handmaid’s Tale narrative ecosystem], published in the book La violenza spiegata. Riflessioni ed esperienze di ricerca sulla violenza di genere [The violence explained. Reflections and research experiences on gender-based violence] (FrancoAngeli, 2020), edited by Felice Addeo and Grazia Moffa.
This is the abstract of my essay:
As a tool of aggregation of the cultural anxieties of the time (Muzzioli 2007), dystopian stories are an example of the faculties of the imaginary to symbolize fears and hopes (Durand 1998). The narrative ecosystem of The Handmaid’s Tale, formed by Margaret Atwood’s novels and the TV series, represents a significant research object, since, on the one hand, it recounts some of the most relevant issues for the feminist movements of the 21st century – female oppression, post-apocalyptic transformation of Western societies (Berger 1999), forms of resistance to patriarchy – and, on the other hand, it feeds transmedia performances of cosplayers dressed as “handmaids”, thus revealing the power of images conveyed by audiovisual media in the processes of re-mythologization of the world (Morin 2016), through forms of struggle, protest, claim.
Keywords: Dystopia, Feminism, TV Series, Imaginary, Transmedia
MARIO TIRINO 