“Domestic Feminism”: The Politics of Reproduction and Motherhood in Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale

Abstract

Popularized by Hulu’s television adaptation, the allegories and iconography of The Handmaid’s Tale have been used in women’s reproductive rights activism around the world. However, at the same time, the series has been recognized and critiqued as offering white, conservative feminism. This article explores how Hulu’s adaptation often works to domesticate Margaret Atwood’s novel and the series’ feminist implications in regard to reproduction and motherhood. While The Handmaid’s Tale has become spectacularly visible as a popular feminist television series, its reproductive politics and representations of women, family and motherhood are largely conservative: waging a limited resistance on behalf of neotraditional white Anglo-western mothers. In light of the Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, this article is motivated by the conviction that it is increasingly important to hold sociocultural representations of reproduction and motherhood to account.

Introduction

In 2018, women from the Demand Justice advocacy group lined the balconies of the foyer outside of Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court Confirmation Hearing. They wore the red robes and white bonnets of “Handmaids,” representing the women used as reproductive slaves in Hulu’s (2017-present) television adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale (Atwood 1985). Evoking the storyworld of Gilead and the series’ “Mayday” resistance movement, the activists posed as Handmaids to signal their concern that Kavanaugh’s appointment—sexual assault allegations notwithstanding—would put women’s reproductive rights at risk by encouraging a conservative U.S. Supreme Court (see Sharf 2018). When Amy Coney Barrett replaced Ruth Bader Ginsburg to render the Supreme Court a conservative majority, once again, Handmaid-style activists descended on Capitol Hill to protest the appointment (see Saad 2020). After Roe v. Wade and Casey v. Planned Parenthood were overturned, Handmaids marched ominously outside of Coney Barrett’s house and protested by the security fences blockading the Supreme Court (see Hajjaji 2022; Tharoor 2022). These abortion rights advocates followed the lead of transnational feminist activists, with similar Handmaid-style political demonstrations having occurred in states including Texas, Ohio, and Alabama, and in countries including Argentina, Poland, and Ireland (see Boyle 2020).

Based on Margaret Atwood’s novel, The Handmaid’s Tale realizes the fears and solutions of the conservative far right and imagines a future where the United States is usurped by a theocratic, totalitarian regime amidst a fertility crisis. Renamed the Republic of Gilead, here, women are explicitly organized in a class system according to their reproductive, domestic and sexual capacity, and the fertile women are enslaved as surrogates called Handmaids, forced to bear children for Gilead’s Commanders and their Wives. Originally, Atwood wrote The Handmaid’s Tale in response to the conservative backlash following the 1973 court decision to instate abortion as a constitutional right for women in the U.S. With the television series premiering in 2017, The Handmaid’s Tale became an increasingly relevant reflection amidst mounting anti-abortion laws, the Trump presidency and a transnational rise of the conservative far right. In this context, the series was appreciated for its elaboration of the anti-Gilead resistance and the Handmaid was quickly taken up as a feminist “rallying cry.” Its allegories and iconography have since spread across activists’ bodies, protest signs, digital feminist activism, and politically-inflected memes, and the series and its symbolism have facilitated the organization and recruitment of feminist and reproductive rights activism in the U.S. and beyond (see Bayne 2018; Boyle 2020; Howell 2019).

The Handmaid’s Tale and its storyworld have been used as transnational shorthand to advocate for the importance of legislation and discourses that safeguard women’s reproductive rights, along with their broader social and bodily autonomy. Hulu’s Handmaid and the resistance she partakes in is widely recognized as a “pro-choice” feminist protest symbol. However, it was not until halfway through its fourth season that the series even made reference to abortion as an option for women. This textual decision might have made sense in the official discourses of Gilead but, until the series’ fortieth episode, abortion and the rhetoric of abortion were completely absent across pre-, mid-, and post-Gilead narratives. Prior to its premiere, Gretchen Sisson (2019), who spent the 2010s documenting popular depictions of abortion, expressed the hope that Hulu’s adaptation would further feminist representations of women’s right to reproductive healthcare. Instead, The Handmaid’s Tale is permeated with absences and, despite its political uptake, is sufficiently polysemic to allow for conservative readings and fandoms. ^*

More than simply lacking in representation, Hulu’s series has been observed to harbor aggressively “pro-life” sentiments and to idolize traditional conceptions of womanhood, marriage and family, motherhood and maternity (Maher 2018; Nazworth 2019). As Napp Nazworth (2019) has written favorably for The Christian Post, “The Handmaid’s Tale has become a symbol of progressive activism, but many of the show’s storylines contain conservative themes” in terms of women role’s, family, and reproduction. As this observation and the aforementioned examples highlight, The Handmaid’s Tale has enjoyed spectacular visibility in the “popular feminist” mediascape (Banet-Weiser 2018) and has been culturally framed and read as offering messages about the existential threats to women’s autonomy. However, many of its feminist impulses are not far removed from the so-called “domestic feminism” that underpins Gilead (see “A Woman’s Place,” Season 1, Episode 6)—a tendency increasingly observable across its five seasons.

At a time when women’s reproductive rights are contending with not only “backlash” but actual repeal (such as in the U.S. and Poland), it is increasingly important that we hold regressive representations of reproduction and motherhood to account, especially when they appear in popular texts that are widely perceived and used as feminist or progressive. Consequently, this article explores the problematic politics of reproduction and motherhood in Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale. First, the article explains how the television adaptation (re)orients the protagonist, Offred/June, and, in turn, the viewer, in relation to traditional conceptions of women, family, and motherhood. Here, I use the novel as a counterpoint to demonstrate how the series makes deliberate updates to Atwood’s characters and narratives in order to render them more conservative. The article then draws attention to the oft-overlooked absences of Hulu’s adaptation: namely, the lack of representations and discourses of abortion, alternatives to procreation, and maternal ambivalence. The third part of the article explores how the series’ reproductive politics thus devolve into the fight for idealized white motherhood as the female right in need of defense. As many critics and scholars have highlighted, The Handmaid’s Tale appeals to “universal” notions of white, middle class, cis-heteronormative womanhood to the detriment of black women and women of color (see Crawley 2018; Gordon 2018; Reich and O’Malley 2021). Subsequently, the final part of the article addresses the series’ uneven representation of white versus non-white mothers, as well as its appropriation and erasure of black and brown women’s experiences. Together, these textual factors work to “domesticate” or make The Handmaid’s Tale’s feminist implications less threatening and less visible, opening the series to anti-feminist, anti-abortion, and white conservative messages and readings.

Family Values

Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale has been appreciated for its emphasis on women’s political resistance. A work of not-so-speculative fiction, Atwood’s novel has been understood as an exaggeration and critique of the ways in which women and mothers are treated in western societies (see Chadha 2009; Latimer 2013, 32–53). In 1985, The Handmaid’s Tale dramatized the anti-feminist “backlash” of the 1980s (see Faludi [1991] 2006) but, famously, did not include anything that has not happened or was not happening in the U.S. and elsewhere (see Atwood 2011; Neuman 2006). With “Offred,” the Handmaid to Commander Fred Waterford, standing in as witness, the novel functions as a critical warning of the widespread complicity in white heteropatriarchy, and a feminist call to action, with Atwood hinting at an internal resistance called “Mayday.” However, Atwood’s Offred is less resistant than complicit in women’s oppression and she tends to conform to traditional gender roles and relationships (see Stillman and Johnson 1994; Weiss 2009). While aware of the existence of an underground resistance, her acts of rebellion are largely contained to her internal narration and her private, often sexual, interactions with Fred and his driver, Nick.

On the contrary, Hulu’s series explicitly realizes the traces of a resistance against Gilead. As Karen Crawley (2018) observes, Offred is transformed from a complicit “everywoman” who creates an archive of witness, to an “unmitigated heroine” who journeys from witnessing to open revolt with/as Mayday (pp. 337–8). In Hulu’s version, Offred/June (Elisabeth Moss), the Handmaids, Marthas (domestic servants), Jezebels (sex slaves), and Commander’s Wives are shown to engage in individual and private, collective and public acts of resistance against Gilead. With June at the forefront, Amanda Howell (2019) argues that Hulu’s adaptation coalesces around the feminist and transmedial potential of the “resistant female voice” and, unlike Atwood’s, Hulu’s women “bear witness, speak up, and talk back” (p. 217). However, at the same time as the series has maximized on the spectacular, serial potential of a women’s resistance movement, it has also placed new emphasis on women’s roles as wives and mothers.

If Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale is a satire on biological essentialism, gender roles, and the pressures and pitfalls of the “institution of motherhood” (Rich [1986] 1995), in many ways, Hulu’s adaptation is a traditional, pronatalist, and essentialist text that idealizes, rather than critiques, the institutions of marriage, family, and motherhood. Much of the narrative and melodrama of Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale revolves around the destruction and restoration of family. This structural and thematic arc is evident from the opening episode. According to Jason Mittell (2015), the first episode of a television series represents a “blueprint for the program”—it orients the viewer and establishes the series’ genre and narrative patterns, introduces the characters, their relationships and motivations, and underscores the major conflicts and themes (p. 56). In short, “the chief function of a television pilot is to teach us how to watch the series” (Mittell 2015, 56). In Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale, the destruction of the nuclear family is foregrounded as the series’ narrative problem. Rather than critiquing the traditional family unit and women’s roles as wives and mothers, the first episode of the series teaches viewers to value these gendered institutions and identities.

Where Atwood’s novel begins in the Handmaid training center with an expression of solidarity between women (Atwood [1985] 2010, 13–4), Hulu’s adaptation opens with June’s family being literally torn apart during their attempted escape. After an introduction to June’s training and her role as Handmaid, the first episode ends with her voiceover announcing “I intend to survive [pause] for her. Her name is Hannah, my husband’s name is Luke, my name is June” (“Offred,” Season 1, Episode 1). This statement of identity and survival is a marked contrast to the novel where the unnamed protagonist merely states “I intend to last” (Atwood [1985] 2010, 17). Hulu’s revision of this moment has been celebrated for its resistant sentiment by feminist critics and scholars, including myself, often expropriated to “I intend to survive [. . .] my name is June” (see, for instance, Boyle 2020, 853; Crawley 2018, 338; Howell 2019). However, where the novel lists Offred’s will “to last” as a human being without qualification, Hulu (re)orients Offred/June and her motivations “to survive” in relation to her family and role as a mother.

Here and thereafter, the reinstatement of June and the Handmaids’ rights to family and motherhood is presented as narrative solution. As Jennifer Maher (2018) observes, June might be more actively resistant toward Gilead than Atwood’s Offred but “June’s decision to join the resistance is frequently referenced as being largely based in her decision to be reunited with her daughter” (p. 209). Instead of her husband and child being out of reach as they are in the novel, the series (re)incorporates them as characters and strives toward the reestablishment of June as wife and mother to Luke (O-T Fagbenle) and Hannah (Jordana Blake), and later, to Nick (Max Minghella) and their daughter Nicole. Instead of representing a reflection of women’s gender roles and the institutions of family and motherhood, the series risks a viewing where Gilead is interpreted as obstructing these ideals.

Traditional conceptions of women, family and motherhood are so central to Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale that the series makes crucial updates to progressive characters and narratives to render them more conservative. In her work on popular representations of motherhood, Katherine N. Kinnick (2009) contends that we must consider what texts choose to “emphasize and valourise” as well as what they “leave out” in order to determine their politics and cultural implications (p. 2). This evaluation is even more critical for adaptations as what is emphasized and left out is not merely cultural but deliberately brought into focus, omitted and/or modified in the adaption process. From page to screen, June’s radical feminist mother is omitted from the Season 1 pre-Gilead narrative. When she is eventually introduced as Holly Maddox (Cherry Jones) in Season 2, key details of her character are changed. Offred’s mother is an influential figure in Atwood’s novel and her rejection of “compulsory heterosexuality” (Rich 1980) and nuclear family provides a point of comparison to Offred’s traditional gender identity, and romantic and familial relationships. In Atwood’s version, Offred’s mother is a voluntarily single woman and mother who becomes pregnant by donor. In Hulu’s, June retains her father’s last name, Osborne (“June,” Season 2, Episode 1), and Holly discusses June’s father as if he was part of their lives and June’s upbringing; donor modified to an implied ex-partner and father (“God Bless the Child,” Season 3, Episode 4).

A similar modification is made to Offred’s friend Moira who is updated and reconfigured as a paid surrogate pre-Gilead. Atwood’s Moira is a radical feminist lesbian who also rejects heteronormative gender roles and familial ideals. Conversely, in Season 2 (“After,” Episode 7), Moira (Samira Wiley) is shown to gladly deliver a child for a married heterosexual couple and it is through her surrogacy that she meets her partner, Odette (Rebecca Rittenhouse), an obstetrician at the hospital. Reflecting discourses which render women “abject” and non-traditional women abhorrent (Kristeva 1982), Atwood’s Gilead classifies those who are not deemed reproductively, domestically or sexually compliant and/or useful as “unwomen,” and exiles or exterminates them. In the omission of Offred’s mother in the first season and the modification of her and Moira’s backstories in the second, the series is complicit in the “unwomening” and erasure of non-traditional women, and the devaluation of alternate family models.

Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale does include different models of gender, relationships, and family but these are largely neotraditional. In the novel, Moira is Atwood’s only queer character but the adaptation extends the ensemble to include Emily (Alexis Bledel), a lesbian woman who was similarly torn from her wife and child to act as a Handmaid. While the television iteration has been lauded for its LGBTQIA+ representation (see, for instance, Sargeant 2018), besides gender, these alternate characters and family units are shown to aspire to normative ideals. In Emily’s case, she and her partner were married pre-Gilead, her son is her biological child and, while Emily worked, her wife stayed home to care for him (“Birth Day,” Season 1, Episode 2; “Unwomen,” Season 2, Episode 2). Such representations are what Kristen Hoerl and Kelly (2010) term “post-nuclear”—configurations that somewhat “contest the viability of the nuclear family but maintain fidelity to neotraditional models” of family and motherhood nonetheless (p. 362).

To further the point, the women and families who do not aspire to normative ideals are critiqued within the series. In flashbacks, Holly, a medical professional who works at a women’s health clinic, is shown to be so focused on her job that she routinely neglects her daughter and misses the birth of her granddaughter (“Holly,” Season 2, Episode 11). Moreover, in the episode titled “Unfit” (Season 3, Episode 8), the wicked Aunt Lydia (Ann Dowd) is given a sympathetic backstory via her experience as a teacher who tried to help a young single mother who was neglectful of her “proper” motherly duties. In many respects, the series is less an exercise in questioning women’s gender roles and institutions of family than it is post-nuclear and neotraditional: a revaluation, not a re-evaluation of marriage, family, and motherhood. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the series’ reproductive politics.

Abortion, Alternatives, and Ambivalence

Even though The Handmaid’s Tale appears to engage with feminist politics surrounding women, reproduction and motherhood, the series contains scant narratives about abortion, alternatives to procreation, and maternal ambivalence. In Gilead, the prevention and termination of pregnancy is outlawed and severely punished but Atwood’s ([1985] 2010) novel does include a pre-Gilead narrative in which Janine had an abortion after being subject to multiple-perpetrator sexual assault (pp. 81–2). The series initially erases this instance of abortion and makes no gesture to abortion as an option for women in pre-, mid-, or post-Gilead narratives (for those lucky enough to escape). Instead, Janine (Madeline Brewer) is represented to have birthed and lovingly raised the child (“Late,” Season 1, Episode 3; “Milk,” Season 4, Episode 4). Following a campaign in which Hulu and The Handmaid’s Tale belatedly declared their support for abortion and Planned Parenthood (see Harper’s Bazaar Staff 2019), Atwood’s abortion narrative was reincorporated in a modified version. Four years after the premiere, Janine’s abortion is shown to have taken place after her child is several years old, when she is a single mother in precarious work with little support (“Milk,” Season 4, Episode 4). After being falsely lured by a “crisis pregnancy center,” Janine locates a women’s health clinic that affirms her reproductive agency and provides her with a medical abortion.

Although the inclusion of abortion represents some progress for the series, the contextualization of Janine as a devoted but struggling single mother works to conservatively rationalize the abortion. In their research on televisual abortions, Gretchen Sisson, Stephanie Herold, and Katrina Kimport have criticized the overrepresentation of high risk and surgical procedures, given that low risk and medical procedures are the norm. Their work additionally highlights the underrepresentation of barriers to abortion access and low-income mothers seeking abortion, who represent a dominant patient group (Herold and Sisson 2019, 2020; Sisson and Kimport 2014, 2017). The Handmaid’s Tale’s overdue representation of abortion is positive in that it depicts a low-risk medical procedure, highlights Janine’s difficulties to secure leave and childcare in order to attend the appointments, and redresses the underrepresentation of patients who are mothers. However, in the absence of other depictions, Janine’s being situated as an unmarried, single mother and low-income earner also serves to explain her decision to terminate the pregnancy in order to render it morally acceptable.

Writing on scripted television in the 1980s, Celeste Michelle Condit (1994) observed that abortion “was only sanctioned when it did not conflict with the values of family and motherhood,” represented as a procedure “for the unmarried or those in otherwise seriously problematic situations” (pp. 138–9). Similar to these earlier “pro-choice” representations, Janine’s abortion is “hemmed in” by normative maternal and familial ideals (Condit 1994, 140) and only occurs after a domestic display where she puts her son to bed and reads him a story by lamp light. The providing doctor might refute the need for Janine to provide justification but the episode works contrarily to justify the abortion. In its erasure in the first three seasons and its rationalization in the fourth, Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale continues televisual tendencies to treat abortion not as a human right and essential women’s health care, but as taboo and only acceptable in certain circumstances (see Condit 1994; Hoerl and Kelly 2010; Latimer 2013; Wayne 2016).

Like Gilead, even in the narratives prior to the takeover, the series presents few alternatives for (fertile) female characters besides procreation. Beyond heteronormative reproduction and family, the roles offered are to be a surrogate mother (such as Moira and the Handmaids), a single mother (such as Janine), a mother in an LGBTQIA+ marriage (such as Emily), an othermother (such as Moira is to Nicole) or, otherwise, a married woman who desires to be a mother (such as Serena Joy Waterford, who is initially thought infertile but later conceives—almost as a result of sheer willpower). Given that women are being forcibly impregnated, it seems implausible that in fifty-six episodes and four seasons beyond the source material, the series has contained no representations of Handmaids’ “unlawful” use of contraception, sterilization or abortion. As David A. Grimes et al. (2006) and many others report, restricting the legality of and access to contraception and abortion does not result in fewer abortions but the increase in unsafe and unregulated pregnancy prevention and termination practices. As it stands, there are no fertile female characters who do not identify with or realize their reproductive capacity to some extent or, otherwise, harbor desire for reproduction in its place. The representation of reproduction as obligatory certainly reflects Atwood’s Gilead but in the absence of alternatives and acknowledgment of the ambivalence women often feel toward pregnancy and motherhood (see Almond 2010; Parker [1995] 2005), Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale is in danger of reiterating the pressures of compulsory motherhood.

With an oft-uncritical emphasis on childbearing, women in Hulu’s series are frequently represented not as persons in their own right but as mothers in their own right. For instance, when the Handmaids are threatened with hanging in Season 2 (“June,” Episode 1), Kate Bush’s (1989) song about a mother and child in crisis, “This Woman’s Work,” plays overhead as the camera closes in on June’s pregnant abdomen, granting personhood and empathy to the recently conceived fetus and June as its mother. While June’s child is born “out of love” (“Unknown Caller,” Season 3, Episode 5), regardless of their circumstances the Handmaids bear little resentment toward their offspring and roles as mothers (Nazworth 2019). It is not until Season 4 that a character, Moira, explicitly states “I never wanted to be a Mum” (“Nightshade,” Episode 2). This moment of ambivalence is woefully fleeting and, of course, by this stage, Moira has already acted as a surrogate mother and is now othermother to June and Nick’s daughter Nicole. These adverse narrative outcomes echo Betty-Despoina Kaklamanidou’s (2019) finding that even when the desire not to have children is openly voiced onscreen, television’s would-be childfree women are routinely refused the option (p. 286). More concerning is that, in Season 3, after Ofmatthew/Natalie harbors barely expressed doubt regarding her fourth pregnancy for Gilead she is killed within the narrative. This underexplored outcome recalls Sisson and Kimport’s (2014) observations of television’s tendency to make casual correlations between narratives of maternal ambivalence and mortality (p. 417). Together, the neglect of these reproductive and maternal realities means that the series works to obscure women’s experiences and further contribute to the stigmatization of abortion and maternal ambivalence. Rather than dismantling the socio-cultural imperative for women to reproduce, Hulu’s series actively reproduces essentialist and pronatalist stories, and desiring mothers.

This (White) Woman’s Work

In Season 1, we learn that Gilead is underpinned by what Serena Joy Waterford (Yvonne Strahovski) and its leaders call “domestic feminism”—an essentialist cultural feminism, or co-option of feminism, that “empowers” women to adopt domestic and family values, and take up motherhood with dignity. Headed by Fred (Joseph Fiennes), Serena and her book, “A Woman’s Place,” the pre-Gilead movement advocated for a “women’s culture,” encouraging women to return to the home and “embrace [their] biological destiny” (“A Woman’s Place,” Season 1, Episode 6; “First Blood,” Season 2, Episode 6). However, like the eighteenth and nineteenth century versions (see Epstein 1981; Hunt 2009; Matthews 1989), this “domestic feminism” has a boomerang effect: rather than elevating the status of women and mothers, its principles allow anti-feminists and proponents of cis-heteronormative gender asymmetry to strengthen their counterarguments against feminist movement. Serena and Gilead’s “domestic feminism” tames and contains feminism. It sustains heteropatriarchal culture and more closely resembles the regressive Victorian “Cult of Domesticity” or “Cult of True Womanhood” that contained (white) women to the home, limited them to feminine virtues of piety, purity and submission, and relegated them to a restricted set of gender roles. Gilead as outcome demonstrates that “domestic feminism” is not feminism but a tactical employment and subversion of feminist rhetoric for regressive purposes. It is thereby concerning that the utopian impulses of the television series are not all that different to Gilead’s.

More than simply lacking representations of alternatives, the series idealizes motherhood and, in particular, biological mothers that are white and cis-heteronormative. Writing of her speculative fiction, Atwood (2011) suggests that each “dystopia contains within itself a little utopia,” and that there are two concealed within The Handmaid’s Tale – “one is in the past” and the second in a post-Gilead “future beyond the main story” (pp. 90–1). In the series, most of the utopic visions in the pre-Gilead past consist of June’s nostalgic memories of mothering. These include depictions of her, her child and husband at the aquarium and the beach (“Offred,” Season 1, Episode 1), at a carnival (“Nolite te Bastardes Carborundorum,” Season 1, Episode 4), cooking pancakes in a log cabin (“The Other Side,” Season 1, Episode 7), at her church baptism (“God Bless the Child,” Season 3, Episode 4) and playing in the park (“Mayday,” Season 3, Episode 13). Absent of maternal ambivalence, these warm-lit, affectively-charged scenes resemble the limited “honey-hued” fantasies of white, middle class motherhood which Douglas and Michaels (2004), among others, condemn as a kind of cultural terrorism on women (pp. 16, 195, 340). As for the utopic visions of the future, many of the series’ narratives strive toward the reunification of June and the white Handmaids with their children, and the reinstatement of their roles as mothers. These “honey-hued” fantasies are shown to act as beacons of hope mid-Gilead and fuel to the Mayday resistance.

Utopias aside, the mid-Gilead narratives romanticize white mothers and maternity, even amidst the horrors of the Handmaid experience. When June is forced to give birth alone in an abandoned mansion in the woods, she is framed as an “earth mother” or “mother goddess,” her white, nude maternal body giving life in a cave-like drawing room lit by a roaring fire (“Holly,” Season 2, Episode 11). When Janine’s daughter with Commander Warren Putnam (Stephen Kunken) succumbs to a terminal illness, Janine is permitted to visit the baby in hospital where her maternal love is shown to be lifesaving. With luminous skin to skin contact, she sings her daughter back to life with Dusty Springfield’s (1963) “I Only Want to be With You,” until she is miraculously cured (“Women’s Work,” Season 2, Episode 8). In Kinnick’s (2009) words, Hulu’s adaptation continues popular tendencies to “idealize and glamourise motherhood as the one path to fulfillment for women, painting a rosy, Hallmark-card picture that ignores or minimizes the very real challenges that come along with parenthood” (p. 3). Through its white characters, the series revels in romantic ideals of pregnancy, motherhood, and maternal instinct.

Where Atwood’s novel is a satire on sociocultural discourses that reduce women to their biology, June and the white Handmaids’ heroism is largely prefaced on their unyielding determination to mother. If Atwood’s Offred is detached from her daughter to ensure her own survival, June is fixated on Hannah to a pathological extent, risking both their lives numerous times if only to get a glimpse of her (see, for instance, “Night,” Season 3, Episode 1). In Season 3, when June is unable to locate her daughter, she resolves to free the other Handmaids’ children and recruits Marthas, Handmaids, a Wife, and Commander for the life-threatening mission of smuggling children across the border. In this fashion, the series’ drama relies on essentialized conceptions of what Adrienne Rich ([1986] 1995) describes as the “pull” or “magnetic field” between mother and child, which is socially imposed to naturalize women as self-negating mothers and caregivers (p. 23). June and the Handmaids take their revenge as “mama bears” (Paulson 2005) and while the series does grant testimony to women’s experiences of violence and oppression (see Boyle 2022), it exhibits a reluctance to portray women as angry on their own behalf. As Linda Alcoff and Laura Gray (1993) write, “women’s anger is generally sanctioned only when it is on behalf of others—primarily children and other family members” (p. 286). Instead of their anger being about their lack of choice, the series’ reproductive politics devolve into the fight for idealized motherhood as the right in need of defense.

Hulu’s adaptation struggles against the social constructionist message of Atwood’s novel in favor of essentialist narratives that mythologize motherhood as women’s biological and narrative destiny. As Maher (2018) asserts, “June will rebel not because she has been forced into maternity but because it has been denied her” (emphasis original, p. 210). In some respects, the series could be interpreted as advocating for “reproductive justice.” This is a black, intersectional feminist reworking of the reproductive rights paradigm which argues for “the right not to have children” as well as “the right to have” and “to parent children in safe and healthy environments” (emphasis added, Ross et al. 2017, xii). In the western colonial context of slave “breeding” and racialised rape; poverty and forced sterilization; state separation of non-white mothers from their children and the devaluation of non-white families, pronatalist, pro-motherhood and pro-family politics are sound (see Collins 1994; Morgan 2004; Nash 2021; Roberts 1997; Ross et al. 2017). However, when championed by a white, middle class, cis-gendered, heterosexual, married mother, reproductive justice is not revolutionary: it is conservative and spiked with traditional western and heteropatriarchal family values.

The Devaluation of Black Motherhood

Concerningly, Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale remains silent on historical and contemporary realities of racial violence and oppression. Atwood’s Gilead was written as an explicitly white supremacist heteropatriarchal regime but Hulu’s version opted for racially and ethnically diverse casting. When questioned about The Handmaid’s Tale’s “colorblind” update, the series’ showrunner explained that the decision was based on the belief that fertility would “trump everything” in a contemporary Gilead (Miller 2018). However, The Handmaid’s Tale’s racialised casting and narrative choices suggest otherwise, further problematizing the series’ politics of reproduction and motherhood. Foremost, black women are cast in limited and stereotypical roles according to reproductive and maternal capacity, and the series awards significantly less prominence to black mothers and motherhood.

In her work on anti-black racism and sexism, bell hooks (1995) contends that the “[d]evaluation of black womanhood is central to the maintenance of white supremacist capitalist patriarchy” (p. 78). A key component of this process has involved the sexual and reproductive exploitation of black women’s bodies and the devaluation of black motherhood (for more, see hooks [1981] 2014, 51–86). Unlike white motherhood, black motherhood in the colonial west has been limited in its cultural development as black women have been, and continue to be, characterized not as mothers in their own right but as “breeders,” surrogates, and nannies (see Hill Collins 1994, [1990] 2009; hooks [1981] 2014; Morgan 2004). In Hulu’s adaptation, the maternal roles for black women are similarly limited to wilful surrogates (both pre- and mid-Gilead in Moira and Ofmatthew/Natalie); carers or othermothers to children who are not their own (such as Frances’ caring of June’s biracial child Hannah, and Moira’s mothering of June’s white child, Nicole); mothers who harbor maternal ambivalence (Moira and Natalie); and women whose children are no longer alive (Rita). Without racial commentary, the series continues to profile black mothers and motherhood according to white racist logic.

The Handmaid’s Tale’s reproductive politics are organized along firmly racialised lines and there are clear differences in its treatment of white and non-white mothers. Although the series opted to “include” actors of color, it was not until Season 3 that an acting black Handmaid was introduced in a prominent role. Rather than reckoning with the resonance of the black female slave experience, the racist exploitation of black women’s bodies and removal of their children, in Ofmatthew/Natalie (Ashleigh LaThrop), The Handmaid’s Tale locates the only Handmaid who seems satisfied with her role as surrogate and devout in her duty to reproduce for the state. Natalie is particularly fruitful compared to the other (white) Handmaids and is pregnant with her fourth child for Gilead. She is partnered with June as a kind of monitor and, despite solidarity between the other women, Natalie is unironically identified as a “pious little shit” (“Mary and Martha,” Season 3, Episode 2) and “breeder” (“Unfit,” Season 3, Episode 8) by June and fellow Handmaids. Later in her pregnancy, Natalie begins to show signs of anxiety as she suspects her unborn baby to be a girl, but she is afforded little camaraderie and is ostracized from the group. When she holds a gun to June and Aunt Lydia, Natalie is brutally shot by a Guardian; a fate that no white Handmaid has met despite worse offenses under Gileadean law.

Rendered braindead, in “Heroic” (Season 3, Episode 9), Natalie is kept alive in a hospital bed until the fetus comes to term. Compared to June’s embodied experience of pregnancy in Season 2, Natalie is reduced to a disembodied surrogate. She lives through tubes, monitors, and catheters, and is described by June as a “vessel” that smells of “sweet decay, like wet leaves, like a dirty scalp, like her shit - soft, unformed, blameless.” Where June’s childbirth is passionate and romantic, a solitary white Madonna giving birth by fire light (“Holly,” Episode 11), Natalie’s child is cut from her belly as she suffers from a seizure, surrounded by male doctors under the hostile light of the hospital. If June’s white maternal body is framed as natural femininity, Natalie’s is framed as “monstrous” (Creed 1993) and “abject” (Kristeva 1982). While the episode does grant some empathy to her as victim, it grants significantly more to June, the witness and “hero” who has been forced to stay with her body until death.

Through Natalie’s narrative, The Handmaid’s Tale could be said to belatedly engage with discourses regarding the black maternal body, which Jennifer C. Nash (2021) argues has come to circulate as a female figure of crisis and mourning to evidence racist outcomes amidst the Black Lives Matter movement. However, beyond the visual, there is no commentary on state violence against black people, nor obstetric and medical violence against black women (see Bridges 2011; Nash 2021, 2–26; Roberts 1997). Further, Nash laments that the renewed focus on black motherhood as suffering means that there is a deficit in images that celebrate mothering as a joyful experience for black women (Nash 2019, 551–552, 572). In suit, Natalie’s abject suffering is never tempered with nostalgic maternal memories pre-Gilead, nor moments of joy with her four children in Gilead. She is given no backstory and where Janine and June are able to name and nurse their babies (although, not without difficulty), Natalie is left to die as soon as hers is born. The underrepresentation of Natalie as a mother might make sense in the context of the Handmaid role but represents a glaring oversight when the series has ample time for the “honey-hued” flashbacks of white Handmaids’ experiences of mothering pre-Gilead, as well as their maternity and prized moments with their children in Gilead. Besides a brief scene where Moira gives the baby she carried as surrogate to the commissioning parents (“After,” Season 2, Episode 7), there are no such equivalents for non-white women and their children. As Stephanie L. Young and Pham (2018) have written on other “colorblind” television, “[w]hether race and racial dialogue are silent, absent, or present at any particular moment [. . .] the optics of race permeate the show” (151; see also Warner 2015). Via its casting and narratives, Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale thus trades in the valorization of white mothers and white motherhood, and the exclusion of black mothers and black motherhood.

Conclusion

Before the premiere of The Handmaid’s Tale’s sixth and final season, over half of the U.S. is expected to ban abortion; a catastrophe that will have dire outcomes for women in the U.S. and elsewhere. In this concerning social context, we must be especially wary of “double entanglements” (McRobbie 2009) or textual movements that promote both progressive and conservative messages in popular feminist culture, lest viewers be misled to think that this is what feminism looks like. Hulu’s Handmaid might be used in feminist movement around the world but the fact that the series is popularly understood to be in favor of feminist reproductive advocacy, to be “pro-choice,” and empathetic toward women, mothers, and their diverse and complex experiences, is empirically contestable. As this analysis demonstrates, The Handmaid’s Tale is not particularly representative of white feminist reproductive rights paradigms, which advocate for women’s access to abortion and contraception. Nor is it representative of black, intersectional feminist paradigms of reproductive justice, which additionally advocate for the rights and resources to have and to parent children—at least not in any meaningful or statistically accurate way. Instead, Hulu’s adaptation loses sight of progressive gender and reproductive politics, continuing to mythologize motherhood for white women and to deny it of others.

The Handmaid’s Tale’s feminism is thus contained and domesticated: attached to essentialist and western conservative notions of women and womanhood, mothers and motherhood. Rather than championing the rights of women and mothers, the adaptation often conflates woman with mother and wages a limited resistance on behalf of neotraditional white Anglo-western mothers. Understanding the series as critical of cis-heteronormative gender roles and as advocating for all women’s bodily and social autonomy thus requires extratextual materials, knowledges, and interpretations. For such reasons, in recent years, feminist organizations such as the Women’s March have begun to ban the use of The Handmaid’s Tale’s in political demonstrations, citing that the series is not useful to the progress of an intersectional and transformative women’s movement (see Gomez 2021). The fact that such decisions have been shrouded in controversy indicates that, for many viewers and activists, the series’ conservatism remains invisible or inconsequential—something which should cause alarm in an enduringly sexist and racist, post-Roe v. Wade culture.