Nolite te bastardes carborundorum. The handmaid in the media discourse about women’s rights
The handmaid is the protagonist of a transmedia story begun with Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel about Gilead, a regime in which women are deprived of their rights. The handmaids are a unique group — they are fertile, a rarity in a country plagued by infertility. The women, treated as objects, are allocated as surrogates to childless couples from the most privileged class. The image of the handmaid became popular thanks to a new generation television series produced for the Hulu platform, and subsequently begun to be used in the fight for women’s rights. In the first part of the article the author analyses the handmaids and their place in the dystopian narrative and in the second — the way in which they are used in the social discourse about women’s rights. In this the author focuses on performative campaigns, corporate social responsibility and links between the characters and the #metoo campaign.