I sort of spoke about this on my podcast, and it might seem like a stretch or a long shot, but I thought it was interesting in the way we read Kindred by Octavia Butler and The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood one after the other because there are a lot of common themes that carry over between the books. There are the obvious mentions of sexual assault, the science fiction element (time travel in the former, dystopian theocracies in the latter), and the disenfranchisement of women. However, one thing we tend to gloss over is that the experiences of both Dana and the Handmaid are both the same experience, historical contexts aside. Both women are forced almost by all aspects of their society to capitulate to the wills of men and higher authorities, sexually and otherwise. Alice must be raped over and over until Dana’s ancestor is born, to keep her from dissolving (hypothetically) into nothingness, and the Handmaid must be sexually assaulted over and over– even if it is a detached, other experience for her. There’s a stark shock factor in both stories, especially around these accounts, but I think that we were more receptive to the plight of the Handmaid because she was considered white. Her only characteristic was her brown hair, so there was an ambiguity there that allows some projection from the reader onto her as a faceless member of society. Thus, for this class, I think most of us assumed she was a white woman, and because the majority of the class is white, her experience became more shocking to us because we never think this to happen to us. In a racial sense, in an implicitly biased sense, I think this is true and that it predisposes us to make more of an effort to justify Alice’s experience as part of her time and distance ourselves emotionally in some sense. We were more willing to accept Dana’s almost-assault and Alice’s continual assault because of the story’s circumstance, assisted by the historical context. But because of the Handmaid being more of an empty vessel to project on (a stand-in for the average woman in an very not-average situation), we project a sense of other-ness, of distinction that separates her from Alice, when there should be no distinction between both stories in terms of the experiences of women. I think that’s an interesting thing to think about, our racial biases that subvert our conscious thought, and I know I was certainly guilty of it while reading both books. I’m curious as to if others felt this way, or if it was solely myself.