This study attempts to examine how gender roles appear in the adaption of Margaret Atwood’s published book, The Handmaid’s Tale TV series, which introduces the fictional and dystopian society Gilead, where the infertility rates decreased as the result of climate change. This study focuses on the first, second and third seasons of the TV series from 2017-19. A qualitative method was used to study how groups of males and females are portrayed in a hierarchy. This study examines how males and females are represented in The Handmaid’s Tale through a content analysis with multimodal critical discourse analysis as a method, completed with gender system theory and feminist standpoint theory. In the study, we focused on four groups of females and two groups of males that were included in an obvious ranking in the hierarchy of Gilead. All of the groups were analyzed separately to observe how their gender roles were represented in the TV series. Consequently, we compared the male groups to the female groups to examine the differences between their representation and ranking in the hierarchy in Gilead. The results of this study shows that males are dominant and females are submissive in Gilead, which confirms the gender theory used in this study. The low-ranking groups of females, such as the handmaids or the marthas also confirmed the existence of the feminist standpoint theory. It shows that the groups of males were placed in the highest ranking in the hierarchy in Gilead, even though some of the women seemed to be powerful, it was not enough to dominate all of the male groups in the hierarchy.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:lnu-103897 |
| Date | January 2021 |
| Creators | Lindgren, Moa, Sheikhmoussa, Aya |
| Publisher | Linnéuniversitetet, Institutionen för medier och journalistik (MJ), Linnéuniversitetet, Institutionen för medier och journalistik (MJ) |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | Swedish |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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