Servants in life and handmaids in art

between The Handmaid’s Tale and Contemporary Far-Right Brazil

Abstract

This article reflects on some power relations semiotized in the series The Handmaid’s Tale (2017, 2018, 2019, 2021) in dialogue with a statement by the former president of the Federative Republic of Brazil and the speech of the first lady at the time, at the inauguration ceremony, with the aim of thinking about the relationship between art (aesthetics) and life (ethics). The reflection is grounded in the Bakhtinian postulates of language, mobilized through verbivocovisual methodological procedures in a dialectical-dialogical movement. The social relevance of the work justifies the study carried out, especially at a historical moment marked by the rise of the far right, with conservative, religious, sexist, and misogynistic valuations, in a society that exploits, controls, and exterminates women, as has been observed in recent years in Brazil and worldwide. The results reveal the need to reflect on and to address the complexity of the nodal relations of gender, class, and race as social elements of heterogeneity and singularity, and not as grounds for segregation in favor of an authoritarian and misogynistic power project.