I Resist, Therefore I Am: Anarcho-Feminist Ontologies In Margaret Atwood’s Fiction

Abstract

This paper seeks to argue that Silvia Federici and Margaret Atwood reverse the narrative by recovering Descartes' claim, "I think, therefore, I am" in order to emphasize a feminist theory of corporeal resistance: "I resist, therefore I am." The paper uses Silvia Federici’s anarcho-feminist theory to examine how female self-hood[1] is constructed and deconstructed in Margaret Atwood’s the Handmaid’s Tale and the Edible Woman. Federici’s writings, especially Beyond the Periphery of Skin and Caliban and the Witch, demonstrate how patriarchal and capitalist systems misuse women’s labor and bodies in order to maintain hierarchical power structures. Atwood’s novels depict this appropriation in two different but related contexts: a contemporary consumer society and a theocratic dystopia. According to both stories, systemic control, commercialization, and reproductive exploitation are the main causes of women’s estrangement from their bodies and identities. Atwood’s protagonists establish fractured but rebellious “selves” through storytelling, acts of resistance and symbolic body reclamation. This paper concludes that by upending the systems that aim to eradicate and erase their identities, Atwood’s female characters represent anarcho-feminist resistance.