The Growing Paradox of <em>The Handmaid’s Tale</em>

This word, —I don’t think it means what thinks it means. Since it debuted in 2017, just a few months into Donald Trump’s administration, the Hulu series has toggled awkwardly between modes. This is a show about ritualized sexual and physical assault, set amid a fundamentalist-Christian theocracy that has stripped women of all basic human rights. But it’s also a show that can’t stop framing June (played by Elisabeth Moss) as a grand feminist icon, a nascent slayer of the patriarchy and purveyor of infinite slow rage-gazes at the camera. With jangly “girl power” musical cues (Lesley Gore’s “You Don’t Own Me” scans strangely in a world where women are assigned to men as property) and the defiant mantras June recites in her head, keeps insisting that its story is an empowering one. The commanders of Gilead, June thinks at the end of Season 1, “should never have given us uniforms if they didn’t want us to be an army,” a nugget so quotable, it was by the verified account @HandmaidsOnHulu.