{"id":324,"date":"2026-05-29T12:25:10","date_gmt":"2026-05-29T12:25:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/csg.ru.ac.bd\/praxis\/?post_type=journal&#038;p=324"},"modified":"2026-05-30T16:06:12","modified_gmt":"2026-05-30T16:06:12","slug":"digital-eyes-dystopian-lies-the-handmaids-tale-and-the-politics-of-modern-surveillance","status":"publish","type":"journal","link":"https:\/\/csg.ru.ac.bd\/praxis\/article\/digital-eyes-dystopian-lies-the-handmaids-tale-and-the-politics-of-modern-surveillance\/","title":{"rendered":"Digital Eyes, Dystopian Lies: The Handmaid\u2019s Tale and the Politics of Modern Surveillance"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>The Handmaid\u2019s Tale <\/em>by Margaret Atwood portrays Gilead as a gendered regime characterized by ritualized visibility. The fundamental principles of this\u2002system 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\u2019s theory of panopticism and Zuboff\u2019s 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, \u201cThe Eyes\u201d) 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\u2019s encryption wars, obfuscation tactics, and collective legal and technological activism can be better perceived and interpreted in alignment with the resistance patterns in Offred\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":265,"template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"article-category":[46,40,47],"class_list":["post-324","journal","type-journal","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","article-category-current-issues","article-category-praxis","article-category-volume-15-december-2025"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/csg.ru.ac.bd\/praxis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/journal\/324","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/csg.ru.ac.bd\/praxis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/journal"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/csg.ru.ac.bd\/praxis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/journal"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/csg.ru.ac.bd\/praxis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/csg.ru.ac.bd\/praxis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/journal\/324\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":326,"href":"https:\/\/csg.ru.ac.bd\/praxis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/journal\/324\/revisions\/326"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/csg.ru.ac.bd\/praxis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/265"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/csg.ru.ac.bd\/praxis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=324"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"article-category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/csg.ru.ac.bd\/praxis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/article-category?post=324"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}