Toxic silence of women in pre-Gilead and pre-pandemic times

Abstract

For a long time, the whole world has been going through difficult times and lurching from one crisis to another including natural disasters, climatic changes, economic uncertainty and political/social turmoil. However, among them, COVID-19 is the one that has put people all around the world in a situation beyond their control with its devastating and lifelong consequences. Since December 2019, it feels each day like people are living out some dystopian novel’s future anew. Like the citizens portrayed in those dystopian works, the citizens of a global pandemic have lost the mastery over their own bodies and minds, and they are imprisoned in a disciplinary system of COVID-19. In that disciplinary system, the coronavirus seems not to discriminate between people; however, its long-lasting impacts do not fall equally. In fact, in a chaotic atmosphere of the pandemic, the patriarchal system makes use of the pre-existing inequalities through which women, once again, are confined into a life of passivity and submissiveness. Due to the toxic masculinity that spreads as fast as coronavirus, they are either forced to accept those truth(s) constructed in semi-silence or internalize them by ignoring. Considering those issues and analyzing The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), one of the most challenging and repulsive works of Margaret Atwood, this study aims to justify the fact that nothing depicted in this novel is too distant future for today’s women, especially after COVID-19. Therefore, basing its argument on Foucauldian discourse analysis and French post-structuralism, it focuses on clarifying how women of the post-pandemic world may also fall victim to violence, exploitation and abuse emanated from toxic masculinity if they remain silent and ignorant against insidious and penetrating phallocentric discourses prevalent in their current societies.