“The Handmaid’s Tale”: (de)personification as an epistemical-moral dimension, founder of the condition of subject of law for women

Abstract

The suppression of the moral and juridical status of the woman is discussed hereby, as an extension of the process of depersonification of the human being in the work The Handmaid’s Tale, by Margaret Atwood. Offred’s story unfolds in a dystopian future where women are the main victims of a new political order. In a United States transformed into the Gilead dictatorship, in the face of eventual loss of fertility by the female population, women are divided into castes and practically lose their rights over themselves, becoming the property of men. Personalization means more than observing rights to the biological being, it is a dialectical process in which individuality and rationality flirt with the inscription of moral importance. This process, being built in the instances of practical philosophy, is prior to the definitions of Law, characterizing itself as a moral construct. Personally, the human being happens to be accepted as the impregnable subject of the Law, which has precisely in the entity of the person its nucleus and the very meaning of its existence. This essay works with the idea of person as a complex being, as in the works by Immanuel Kant (1785), Lucien Sève (1994), Raquel Hogemann (2015) and Oswaldo Pereira de Lima Junior (2017).