I will be focusing on the global issue of the objectification of the female body as a method of

disempowering women. The literary work I will be discussing is the 1985 novel The Handmaid’s Tale
by Margaret Atwood. The novel is a speculative fiction where the pushback movement against
women’s rights overpowers the government and women become second-class citizens. It is a portrayal
of the control of women’s bodies through treating them as reproductive objects. The non-literary body
is the collection Making America Misogynistic Again by Saint Hoax. In this collection, Saint hoax
recontextualizes misogynistic vintage ads by pairing them with contemporary Trump quotes to
demonstrate how Trump objectifies women’s bodies as sexual objects which he dominates. These two
works demonstrate how objectifying women's bodies as tools for men to utilize is a method for
disempowerment.

The literary extract I will explore is a passage in chapter 2 of The Handmaid's Tale. In the novel, the
protagonist Offred is given the role of a handmaid, where her value is centralized around her fertility
and her body is used to produce a child for the regime Gilead through state-mandated copulation. The
extract is an insight into the thoughts of Offred as she carefully describes her morning routine. It
portrays of how female bodies are objectified as tools to serve men in order to disempower women.
Offreds thoughts are fixed on the visual imagery that surrounds her, On lines 3-5 she mentions her
“red shoes”, “red gloves”, and “everything except the wings around (her) face is red, the color of
blood, which defines us”. Through the repetition of red, Offreds illustrates how her visual identity is
solely focused on her reproductive role, where the color that defines her, alludes to her menstruation.
It acts as a constant reminder, that if her body fails to bear a child, it fails to be of any worth since it is
only an object purposed for pregnancy. This idea is mirrored when Offred herself refers to the
handmaids as “two-legged wombs”, in chapter 23. By metaphorically objectifying herself as a
reproductive vessel, Offred highlights how the regime disempowers women by making them perceive
themselves as tools.

From lines 7-9 Offred explains how ”The white wings too are prescribed issue: they are to keep us
from seeing, but also from being seen”. the ‘white wings’ are biblical symbols for the purity of angels,
they purify the handmaids through desexualization by shielding their faces. Gilead is a theocracy,
inspired by Puritan society, where laws from fundamentalist interpretations of the bible are taken
literally. Thus, the desexualization of women’s bodies is a highly prevalent motif throughout the
novel. It is mirrored through the handmaid’s “ankle-length skirt” and “flat yoke that extends over their
breasts” creating the visual imagery of a concealed and nonsexual body. It is highly ironic, as their
purpose is entirely reliant on sex yet their enforced identities are entirely non-sexual. This
contradictory restriction of sexuality is yet another method of disempowerment through
objectification, where the ceremonial sex, is not allowed to be viewed as sexual as their bodies are not
individual women but reproductive tools. During the ceremony in chapter 16, Offred describes how
the commander “is fucking the lower part of (her) body” Offreds cold tone conveys the impersonal
nature of this act to amplify how her body is simply an object that the regime overpowers.

At the end of the extract, Offred leaves the room “into the polished hallway, which has a runner down
the center, dusty pink. Like a path through the forest, like a carpet for royalty” This simile illustrates a
romanticized and luxurious path, reiterating the irony of the treatment of the handmaids. The path
depicts the handmaids as being in a position of privilege through the comparison with royalty, yet in
reality, Offred is enslaved. This simile embodies Offred’s disempowerment where the regime
redesigns perceptions of right and wrong about the treatment of women’s bodies. Through
objectifying them as reproductive vessels, Gilead is enabled to characterize this slavery as good. The
objectification of the female body as a form of disempowerment became increasingly normalized with
the rise of President Donald Trump, this strategy in the dystopian Gilead was frequently echoed by the
symbol of power in the United States.

The non-literary extract that I will be exploring is a print by the anonymous Syrian Artist Saint Hoax,
an artist who creates pop art in order to make political commentary. The print from the collection
“Making America Misogynistic Again” recontextualizes a vintage ad from 1952 by superimposing it
with the Trump quote “Grab Them By The Pussy” illustrating Trump’s objectification of women’s
bodies as sexual objects which he controls. The print draws immediate attention to the foregrounded
image depicting a man spanking his wife whilst she is flailing around on his knees. The contrast
between the stability of the man and woman is metaphorical for the power imbalance. The man is
sitting securely on a chair and has absolute control over the physical fate of the woman reflecting how
he would have had absolute control over the woman’s bodily freedom at that time. By portraying how
the woman is being overpowered by the man, Saint Hoax characterizes the woman’s body as a
powerless object which the man uses as he wishes.

This is magnified by the horizontal and vertical composition. The man dominates the vertical imagery,
highlighting his clear power status whilst the horizontal woman creates a structure and frame to the
image, uplifting the visual elements of the man and drawing attention to him. This serves as an
additional metaphor as the woman’s body is used as a tool to emphasize the man’s status as she is
disempowered through his clear dominance. Saint Hoax reiterates this idea in another print with the
Trump quote “for a man to be successful he needs support at home, not someone who is always
griping and bitching”. The print reveals how Trump perceives women as objects solely purposed for a
man’s egoistic gratification.

The quote “Grab Them By The Pussy” is from a taped conversation from 2005 where Trump can be
heard bragging about his sexual conquests. The use of the highly pejorative slang “Pussy” further
amplifies Trump’s ideals that he can dominate women’s bodies. Beyond being slang for vagina, pussy
connotes weakness; a characteristic associated with women. This association enables Trump to
objectify women as this vulnerable bodily part, which due to its perceived weakness, he can
overpower and control.

The word “Grab” is emphasized by the heteroglossia. Trump’s misogyny is highlighted through the
juxtaposition of the aggressive verb ‘grab’ which entails seizing an object in a rough manner with the
aggressive imagery of the man assaulting his wife. This intertextuality portrays Trump’s literal
meaning behind “Grab Them By The Pussy”, amplifying how he believes women are sexual objects
that he has the power to take. The romanticized violence towards women is reflected in another print
where the quote reads “I tell my friends to be rougher with their wives” whilst a woman is being
dragged by her hair. The prints exhibit how Trump believes all women’s bodies are his objects of
pleasure, thus acts of dominance through sexual assault are within his right.

The collections use of vintage ads portrays how trumps attitudes reflect anachronistic attitudes from
before the womens movement, this extract emphasizes this through the black and white composition
as black and white media alludes to the mid 19 hundreds where women were essentially household
tools. The collection was named Making America Misogynistic Again to ridicule the Trump campaign
slogan Making America Great Again. The insinuation that America was greater in the past implies
that female bodies being subjected to male dominance contributed to greatness, which rather
appropriately reflects trumps ideal about women.
Margaret Atwood and Saint Hoax portray the objectification of the female body in seemingly opposite
lights. Atwood’s novel consists of objectifying women into nonsexual, functional tools for
reproduction. whilst, Saint Hoax conveys how Donald Trump perceives women’s bodies as entirely
sexual objects purposed for his pleasure. Yet in both, the objectification of women’s bodies led to their
disempowerment. Additionally, neither author/artist created ideas from scratch yet rather made
political commentary about the misogyny in society. Their inspirations spanned from attitudes in the
50s to contemporary attitudes, indicating that the objectification of the female body is not obsolete,
but rather as relevant in the contemporary world as in the more obvious patriarchy of the past.