Spolier warning: Contains spoilers for The Handmaid's Tale seasons 1-3.
I'm finally breaking up with the TV series The Handmaid's Tale. This has been a long time coming. I've loathed the adaption since its very first season. I kept watching in the hope that perhaps, with the second season extending beyond the scope of novelist Margaret Atwood's original text, the show may get creative and compelling in order to flesh out its own world. Unfortunately, this simply has not happened.
What originally concerned me has been written about by numerous other opinion writers: the colour-blindness of the show. The world of Gilead is a puritanical and fascist society based around the forced reproductive labour of a handful of women for the glory of those who hold the power. In the novel, Atwood wrote that the 'Children of Ham' had been resettled — the inference being that people of colour had been rounded up and had ultimately met their deaths.
Yet for some reason, the Gilead of the television series had people of colour everywhere. In the television interpretation, we are supposed to believe that a world which is both incredibly class-driven and misogynistic is also miraculously non-racist. Even though we know, through both the theory of intersectionality and basic world history, that this never actually happens.
There are black and brown handmaids, black and brown commanders and mixed-race partnerships. The main character June, for example, has a black partner, and her best friend Moira is a black lesbian. Yet there is absolutely no exploration of that race politics. My own experience with mixed-race partnerships indicates that race politics does not simply evaporate because two people choose to be together — indeed it's consistently present, discussed and important.
The show has instead chosen to completely ignore these important race-based dynamics for reasons it has never bothered explaining. Perhaps the creators felt that in current times, in light of criticisms of Hollywood whitewashing (see, for example, this excellent takedown on John Oliver's Last Week, Tonight), it would be better to be more representative. Instead though, The Handmaid's Tale has managed to merely erase the experiences of people — particularly women — of colour, for no reason other than to make its cast more diverse.
I've now lost count of the number of think-pieces I have read from white feminists claiming that Gilead 'could happen'. According to these pieces, the Trump administration in the US is going to lead that country to this inevitable horrific Gileadean conclusion. Yet the women in Gilead are experiencing nothing that many women of colour have not experienced time and time again. Indeed, Atwood herself stated that all the events in her book had been drawn from real world examples.
Forced labour? The African slave trade, 'stolen wages' and black-birding already tell that tale. Reproductive control? One needn't look further than the Stolen Generations in Australia. Rounding up black people and resettling them elsewhere sounds awfully like our missions, or even the prison camps and lock hospitals. It additionally sounds like the original theories behind the Native American reservations, and the segregation of African American people.
"In other words, a white woman has been positioned as the face of the rebellion while a black woman is happily siding with the oppressors."
As for enforced puritanical rule, in addition to the aftermath of the Iranian revolution (by which Atwood was partly inspired), it would be difficult to name a single Indigenous population colonised by the west which has not been subjected to intense religious conversion programs.
For those privileged white feminists, these threats appear new. For many other women, however, this is a lived reality, and white women have benefited from these realities. The true problem therefore is how society consistently interprets these happenings as being far more horrific when they are enacted upon white people while continuing to ignore the suffering they enact upon non-white people.
Instead of acknowledging this, the Hulu adaption of The Handmaid's Tale has consistently told us that someone's gender and sexuality is far more important than their race. I continued to watch despite this erasure and also despite the sometimes gratuitous violence in the hope it would get better. Instead, the show has only succeeded in becoming more absurd.
The third season of the show seems to consist almost entirely of close-ups of June glaring into the camera; that's when it's not trying to get us to buy the ridiculousness of handmaids having their mouths pierced shut while concurrently being expected to bear the next generation.
The final straw for me has been the introduction of Ofmatthew, a black handmaid who is pious, compliant and so outwardly devoted to the maintenance of the Gilead society that she has no problem reporting her fellow servant class members for misdemeanours. June, meanwhile, is working towards the rebellion, as well as trying to rescue her daughter Hannah, who has been given as a daughter to a commander. In other words, a white woman has been positioned as the face of the rebellion while a black woman is happily siding with the oppressors.
It's one thing to try to stomach this dynamic as it is playing out in front of me. It is quite another to watch that white woman onscreen launching herself at the black woman and attempting to strangle her because she believes that black woman is ruining her attempts to dismantle the system. As an Aboriginal woman viewer, I find the situation the creators are wanting me to buy not just absurd but offensive. With this, any small hopes I maintained that they would eventually use their diverse cast to explore race politics has vanished. It is simply not going to happen.
So for now, it's an 'under his colour-blind eye' from me.
Celeste Liddle is a trade unionist, a freelance opinion writer and social commentator. She blogs at Rantings of an Aboriginal Feminist.
Main image: Elisabeth Moss as June in The Handmaid's Tale.