THE FALSE PROMISE OF ‘USTOPIA’. Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam Trilogy: Utopian Feminist Romp or Dystopian Postfeminist Cautionary Tale?

Abstract

The Canadian author Margaret Atwood’s dystopian MaddAddam trilogy is a text that attempts a critical rebalancing of an established gender hierarchy. The novels expose the fundamental power imbalances present in a binary gender system. As the trilogy enters a speculation into a post-apocalyptic fall-out of environmental disaster and autocratic corporations, a global pandemic and extreme bio-scientific experimentation provide the catalysts for feminine subjective becoming. Here a narrative of gender identities, and their unstitching, reveals the structures that conceivably brought on the global crisis in the first place. I argue that the trilogy’s dystopian tendency is a trope that acts to bring patriarchal gender structures to the fore, but that utopia can also be glimpsed. In doing so, Atwood examines normativity, exposes hierarchies and explores established ways that seek to rupture stable categories. Through an analysis of the trilogy’s protagonists I show how unyielding the binary gender system is against a critical redressing of established power structures. Atwood subverts the binary stronghold by presenting characters that resist categorization and promote subjective mobility.