Season one of The Handmaid’s Tail is a film that brings ideas of slave/master and othering. The series starts off with first acknowledging there is a one. The one being wealthy white men or so we think. These white men are the ones who are given all the power. This is because with they were able to convince the minds of both the others and the one that the others are beneath them. The show created a society where women were beneath men having they do not have the right to own property. Meaning they were able to convince women they were at a level that didn’t deserve to own anything of value. This created a construct that reinforced the ideas of master/slave. To the point of having the slave believe they deserve their role and the master deserved theirs.
The show goes into further depths of othering by separating the groups that were beneath the white men of power. There was of course their wives, then a military would be below them. They then had workers, property, and then those who could not meet the needs of being property were set to do undesirable work which caused them to be sick and die due to the health conditions set by the type of work they endured. These separations caused othering within the minority groups. The minority being those able to have children. Those who could not but had other skill sets. Then as mentioned before those who could not meet the requirements of any other group. What’s interesting is that I order to get help from other countries there was an organization attempting to get the stories of the women who were forced to live as property and conceive children for the “one” population.
Some questions that are left to be taken away include: How can the ideas of a small group grow to the point of changing the values and views people hold for themselves? How can the voices of those being oppressed is affected by silencing and wrongful story telling? Who has the power of story telling? Who is the one and who is the other and what gives them the power of title? How were they able to create system from a point of potential progression to regression?