“Give Me Children, or Else I Die”

This chapter takes an intersectional feminist approach to Margaret Atwood&s;s novel The Handmaid&s;s Tale (1985) and its television adaptation (2017–2025) by examining how they resist reproductive futurity (where the child symbolizes and ensures the future) and gesture towards alternative symbols of futurity. The series extends the novel&s;s political argument against the state-sanctioned control of women&s;s bodies and the use of reproductive loss as a symbol of a dystopian future by dramatizing maternal acts and storytelling as radical acts of resistance. Although the novel&s;s narrator (Offred) is, in Atwood&s;s own words, “an ordinary, more-or-less cowardly woman (rather than a heroine),” she emerges as a strong political force driven by her role as a mother in the television series. There are, however, limits to Offred&s;s radical motherhood that raise questions about different racialized experiences of reproduction. Ultimately, the novel and television series work towards using storytelling and empowered motherhood as new symbols of the future that resist compulsory reproduction.