Abstract

The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood portrays Gilead as a gendered regime characterized by ritualized visibility. The fundamental principles of this system of control are scarily similar to those that stalk the world of digital surveillance today. The paper analyzes Gilead as a panoptic architecture, a blueprint for the engineered invisibility of contemporary surveillance by providing a gender-conscious synthesis of Foucault’s theory of panopticism and Zuboff’s conception of surveillance capitalism. It suggests that surveillance is a hybrid process, one which occurs at once through an explicit, ritualized surveillance (uniforms, shaming in public, “The Eyes”) and an implicit, computational surveillance (data mining, profiling, predictive nudging), and supports this argument with a close textual reading of the novel and an interdisciplinary interest in surveillance studies. By so doing, it discovers that both have similar detrimental effects: they lead to self-censorship, destroy privacy, and disproportionately affect women and other marginalized communities. The paper also examines how today’s encryption wars, obfuscation tactics, and collective legal and technological activism can be better perceived and interpreted in alignment with the resistance patterns in Offred’s coded speech, clandestine acts, and other such micro-resistances. Lastly, the paper contends that we need to work out an ethics of limits that should help determine purposes in such a way that will guarantee fair and open approval of individuals and improve fairness in the use of surveillance technology, and thus, it transforms the literary critique into a prescriptive intervention into the current debates on privacy, power, and digital justice, instead of a descriptive account of them.