There is already, by the way, a very good film adaptation (1990) with the late Natasha Richardson as the handmaid Offred. I’m not sure whether plans for this already existed before the November 2016 election, but next month a TV series based on Atwood’s book will be released ( ). Since Margaret Atwood’s dystopian fable The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) has become an instant best-selling novel in the land of Donald Trump, you hear plenty about feminist speculative fiction these days in the media. For her, generating this renewed utopian vision is the challenge today. Lynne Segal claimed that for utopia to re-emerge someone needs to have a clear vision of what it should be like. Next the conversation moved onto how a society can reach happiness in our current dystopian world, and whether utopia will ever resurface. Norway was recently chosen the happiest country in the world and this is pretty far up north. This started your classic exchange about how we, Southern Europeans, appear to enjoy ourselves in the streets much better than our Northern peers, though I have never been fooled by this idea. It appears that a very cruel member of the audience in a previous presentation asked Segal whether her next book would be about dying… She has chosen instead to write about happiness, and this is what her talk here in Barcelona dealt with.Īctually, the talk, which was a conversation with us, the 15 attendees, soon veered towards dystopia and utopia because Segal argued that personal joy can only be truly achieved in connection with the community (I paraphrase). I first heard about Segal because of her excellent book Slow Motion: Changing Masculinities, Changing Men since then I have also read by her one of the very few outstanding books on heterosexuality, Straight Sex: Rethinking the Politics of Pleasure and her accomplished volume Out of Time: The Pleasures and Perils of Ageing. Last week I attended a talk by Lynne Segal ( ), a feminist academic and activist, born in Australia but based in the United Kingdom.
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