At a moment when Atwood’s work is being reread in light of democratic erosion, reproductive politics, and the regulation of speech, this session proceeds from the view that changing political conditions can bring new features of these texts into view. It is organized around the idea that the relationship between art and historical context is not one-way: altered historical conditions renew the force of literary works, while those works in turn help readers think more precisely about the present. Reading testimony in Atwood’s fiction as strategic performance rather than transparent truth-telling, the papers on this panel explore how characters manipulate their own narratives, deform authoritative language to create new meanings, and use emotional expression to undermine systems built on shame and control. The session also places Atwood studies in conversation with scholarship on testimony, feminist narratology, affect theory, and neoliberalism. Collectively, the papers suggest that Atwood’s fiction is especially useful for thinking about the political stakes of narrative control: who gets to speak, under what conditions, in what forms, and to what ends.
Serra Hughes, in “Citing It Wrong: Communication Breakdown as Liberatory Space in Margaret Atwood’s Gilead,” argues that The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) and The Testaments (2019) reveal the emancipatory potential of communication breakdown. In Gilead, scripted greetings replace conversation, literacy bans enforce silence, and biblical narratives are rewritten to control women’s bodies. Drawing on Judith Butler’s theory of citational constraint, Hughes shows that citation is never airtight, and that Atwood locates agency in this imperfection. A handmaid’s mock-Latin scratched into a wall and Aunt Lydia’s corruption of an institutional motto into “Per Ardua Cum Estrus” demonstrate characters generating agency by deforming the language of authority rather than opposing it directly.
In “‘It’s Better Not to Form Attachments’: Gilead, Neoliberalism and Positioning Care as Resistance in The Handmaid’s Tale,” Holly Parker explores how Offred’s emotional authenticity functions as resistance against Gilead’s logic of shame and productivity. Focusing on Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel alongside Bruce Miller’s 2017 television adaptation, Parker examines how The Handmaid’s Tale presents a totalitarian regime as a cautionary extension of neoliberal culture centred on emotional self-management and reproductive control. Parker argues that Atwood positions Offred’s care and emotionality as a primary form of resistance against totalitarian demands.
Finally, Riley Thomas, in “Fake Accounts: Story as Empowerment in Atwood’s Alias Grace,” investigates how Margaret Atwood’s 1996 novel revisits the story of Grace Marks through a gendered lens. Thomas argues that Atwood creates for Grace an empowered voice that resists the masculine desire to learn, understand, and consume the mind of a woman who contradicts societal expectations. Weaving together newspaper clippings, historical accounts, and literary references, Atwood confronts the public desire to know and possess while paying little regard to what is “true” and what is storytelling.
In a seventy-five-minute online session, each presenter will speak for approximately eighteen to twenty minutes, leaving at least fifteen minutes for unstructured discussion of the shared question of how testimony operates as a strategic tool of survival and resistance in Atwood’s fiction. The panel brings together scholars from Canada, the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands, representing different career stages and methodological approaches, including narratological, affective, and feminist political readings of Atwood’s work.