Miller, Andrea

This thesis investigates the role of myth in Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale. Through an analysis of concepts such as the body and nation, I investigate the mythical underpinnings of gender, race, social reproduction, and capitalism in Gilead as well as the veritable history of oppression and imperialism in the United States that informs the Gileadean imaginary. I interrogate myth’s utility in creating nations and worlds, real or imagined, and the mechanisms of myth that make this possible. Using the works of authors such as Roland Barthes, Kalindi Vora, Achille Mbembe, and others, I read The Handmaid’s Tale series as a text that reveals how truth can be distorted by myth but can be demythologized to belie intention, historically contextualize, and inspire resistance. Written in the midst and wake of the overturning of Roe v. Wade, this thesis is also a meditation on auto-ethnographic and textual resistance.

This thesis examines Indigenous environmental justice discourse within the context of the U.S. carceral settler-state to advance a conceptual framework I name discursive frontierism. I use rhetorical analysis informed by critical and cultural theory to help make visual—and visible—the ways in which colonial frontierism operates in discursive spaces. I analyze the language of the carceral settler-state, including embodiment and affect as communicative language, as well as the language of Indigenous and Indigenous-led resistance. In the first half of the thesis, I argue that the language of the settler-state discursively constitutes Indigenous peoples as criminals and colonial subjects in order to justify their removal. The second half of this analysis finds the language of Indigenous land and water protectors to model and declare “survivance”—an active and continuing “sense of presence over absence” that both renounces dominance and victimry, and preserves traditional knowledge systems and ancestral connections (Vizenor 2018). I conclude that discursive iterations of Indigenous survivance meaningfully thwart the U.S. state’s efforts to advance occupation of discursive territory and further settle the discursive frontier.