Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale is set in a dystopian future in which the United States of America has been taken over by right-wing Christians who've created the Republic of Gilead.

Gilead is a theocracy based on extremely twisted interpretations of Christian values.

This patriarchal and hierarchical society's main and most shocking characteristic is its treatment of women, especially handmaids, who are fertile women who have been captured and held against their will, with their main purpose being to conceive and birth babies for wealthy, elite families who are unable to do so themselves.

As a politics, history and literature student, this novel and its Hulu adaptation makes for a very interesting study for me, especially since it's so relevant today.

In this video essay, I will use a political lens to analyse the novel and series, focusing specifically on female oppression, religion, the oppressed and the oppressors, the cause and the resistance.

At the very end, I'll also give the conditions that I believe the Republic of Gilead could finally be defeated in.

Gilead oppresses all women in many different and interconnected ways.

Marthas are reduced to servants, young girls are trained to be servants to their husbands one day, and even the wives are subjected to different forms of oppression.

But arguably, the worst of the oppression is felt by the handmaids, who are sexually assaulted regularly and promptly forced to carry and give birth to a child who will then be ripped away from them by the family that they've been assigned to.

This not only relates to the rampant sexual assault and gender-based violence in modern-day society, but also the growing issue of reproductive rights.

You probably heard the term forced birth a lot last year when Roe v Wade was overturned in the US.

Now more than ever, the right to abortions and basic bodily autonomy is a pressing issue amongst women and feminists all over the world.

And I think The Handmaid's Tale brilliantly portrays just how far the oppression of some women could go.

It's actually quite scary to think that some countries are not too far off from Gilead.

I especially liked how the series portrayed the gradual change in society.

There wasn't a case where women just woke up one day and suddenly all their rights had been stripped from them and they were suddenly abused that slowly but surely stripped them of their rights.

One day, businesses were not allowed to have female employees.

The next day, women's credit cards were being declined because they were no longer allowed to have their own bank accounts.

Suddenly, you couldn't do anything without your husband's approval.

This oppression was introduced so slowly, slowly enough that many women didn't have time to leave.

Many women didn't even think to leave because it happened so unnoticeably.

and eventually they found themselves in the red center and they had been reduced to breeding cattle.

Gilead is without a doubt an oppressive patriarchal society.

Women's bodies are controlled, objectified and commodified.

The handmaids are valued solely for their reproductive abilities since pollution has left most of men and women in the world infertile.

Genital mutilation, forced birth and ritualised rape are just some of the tortures the handmaids are subjected to in Gilead.

How complex, intersectional and multi-layered oppression can be.

So who exactly contributes to this oppression?

I like to think of the oppression as a hierarchy.

with the men, specifically the commanders, at the very top.

We've already established that Gilead is an oppressive patriarchal system built on the oppression and degradation of women, so the commanders are in charge of not only their own households but the country as a whole as they make up Gilead's government.

It is also these commanders who assault the handmaids regularly during the ceremony in hopes of impregnating them.

Under the husbands are the wives and as we've already spoken about the wives of the commanders although oppressed as women still rank quite highly in the hierarchy of Gilead and they are therefore both the oppressed and the oppressors.

Right under the wives we have the aunts who contribute and maintain the oppressive system by training and indoctrinating the handmaids.

They are also oppressed by virtue of the fact that they are women but they've been co-opted into the system and are now actively playing a role in keeping the system going.

I personally don't think that we can talk about Gilead without talking about its main purpose and the reason that it was created in the first place, its goal.

I would like to read you a line that really stood out to me the first time I read this book.

It's actually from the very first page.

there's a rug on the floor oval of braided rags this is the kind of touch they like folk art archaic made by women in their spare time from things that have no further use a return to traditional values waste not want not I noted here that a return to traditional values is interesting and the interesting thing is that traditional values such as not wasting are not necessarily innately bad it's the radical way in which Gilead implements them that is evil and cruel and I think this can be said about a lot of political or religious regimes that have been oppressive.

Sometimes their aims aren't bad per se, it's the methods by which they seek to achieve their aims that are inhumane.

Gilead was created by capitalism and industrialization and greed.

And so returning to the traditional value of not wasting, not being wasteful, that's not inherently bad.

I don't think that the traditional value of not being greedy, not wasting, being a devoted mother, I don't think that those traditions are bad.

I think that Gilead went wrong by forcing these values on everyone, by assuming that everyone wants to and has to play a role way too far with their return to traditional values.

For them, a return to traditional values wasn't just about not being greedy or wasteful.

They also brought back the disgusting gender roles and enforced them extremely strictly so that wives could not be anything but wives and mothers and homemakers.

Women did not have a choice.

You have to be the woman of the household.

You have to devote your entire life to your husband and your child.

Gilead seemed to be blaming the fertility crisis on modern women who are able to have careers and pursue things outside of her family and they wrongly placed the blame on them and we even see in the series that sometimes it wasn't even the women themselves who were the infertile ones, sometimes it was the men.

So I do think that the aims of Gilead may have been noble in some respects, but I think their focuses were completely off.

They shouldn't have focused only on the faults of the women, they shouldn't have placed the blame of the fertility crisis solely on women, they shouldn't have taken away women's abilities to be free and independent and focus on other pursuits.

They could have addressed pollution and the degradation of earth without turning it into a society with very very traditional and oppressive gender norms.

And they certainly did not have to subject the handmaids to the violence that they subject them to in Gilead.

The novel and especially the series portrays many different kinds and different instances of resistance.

Firstly we had sort of a psychological or mental resistance which just meant that the handmaids themselves were not being swayed by the religious propaganda that was being fed to them.

No matter how many times the aunts trained them to believe that they were serving a higher purpose and serving God's will for them by being ritualistically assaulted by the commanders, no matter how many times they were told that this is God giving them a second chance, most of them remained firm in their belief that this was oppression and what was happening to them was wrong and that they needed to get out.

Then of course we saw May Day which was the underground resistance made up largely of Martha's and in addition to this underground resistance there were small acts of rebellion and small acts of disobedience and defying the law when possible and doing their best not to get caught.

These could be seen in how the handmaids would secretly tell their real names to each other.

So instead of introducing themselves as Offred or Ofwarren, which were the names assigned to them based on the commander that they were assigned to, they would introduce themselves with their real names.

I'm June, I'm Moira.

So those were examples of small but extremely significant acts of disobedience that kind of just showed that they were still themselves, they hadn't been completely indoctrinated by the system.

So to end this off, I would like us to think about what it would take for this oppressive regime to be overthrown.

I would like to say something that my history professor last year said to describe how apartheid South Africa eventually fell apart.

If you think of an oppressive system as a table that rests on legs, if these legs are taken away or slowly crumble, the system comes crashing down.

So during apartheid, the legs that the apartheid regime stood on were cooperation from people within.

Even local authorities were co-opted and cooperated with the apartheid government, even though they themselves were oppressed under that very regime.

The apartheid government stood on support economically from other countries.

It stood on obedience and making the black population feel inferior and like nothing that they could do could possibly overthrow them, even though whites were literally the minority.

So I think this can kind of be compared to what's happening in Gilead.

Gilead really does rely on cooperation.

Cooperation from the aunts who as we said train and indoctrinate the handmaids, cooperation from the wives who, although they are oppressed in many ways, they do benefit from the system and so it benefits them to cooperate.

Even though maybe they have certain rights taken away from them, what they get out of it at the end of the day far outweighs what they lose.

And other people who or other entities that cooperate with Gilead are the countries that still have economic ties with them.

So what Gilead would need is a combination of factors, external and internal, to push Gilead's government under.

So I think the external factors needed to overthrow the government of Gilead would be for other countries to wake up to the civil rights abuses happening in Gilead which would hopefully lead them to take such actions as sanctions, boycotts, disinvestment and just general economic pressure.

Basically saying if you don't stop these human rights abuses we're not going to do trade with you anymore, We're not going to invest anymore.

You are going to be completely politically and economically isolated if you don't stop these human rights abuses.

And then of course there would need to be internal factors.

There would need to be full resistance from the oppressed and also from those who take part in the oppression.

If the aunts were to just stop participating and stop cooperating, the system would almost definitely come crumbling down.

If the wives woke up and realised that women are being oppressed, they are being oppressed, what's happening to the handmaids for the benefit of the wives is not okay.

If the wives and the aunts and all the handmaids and all the unwoman and the guardians, if they just all woke up and saw how everybody under the commanders are oppressed in some way, if they came together and formed a solid united force against the commanders, there would be nothing keeping Gilead afloat.

There would be nothing keeping the commanders in power.

What's keeping the commanders in power is the cooperation that's sustaining the government.

So if everyone just rose up and made the system unsustainable, it would eventually collapse.

Everyone needs to realize the power of their collective agency and be brave enough to overthrow the oppressive systems that stand in their way.

And this isn't just true for the novel.

I think this is true for any oppressive system.

once people realize their power and band together against the oppression that they're faced by, their agency together is powerful enough to overcome any structure.

Thank you.