From ‘Mayday’ to #MeToo: Sexual Harassment in Margaret Atwood’s Dystopian Workplaces in The Handmaid’s Tale, The Testaments and The Heart Goes Last

Despite its legal proscription in most countries and the global attention garnered by the #MeToo movement, workplace sexual harassment remains a ubiquitous part of millions of women’s daily lives. The aims of this chapter are threefold: first, to briefly examine the legal foundation as it pertains to gendered abuse in the workplace; second, to review reports, statistics and scholarly debate on occupational sexual harassment in the wake of the #MeToo social media campaign; third, to analyse the literary representation of workplace inequality and female maltreatment in three works of dystopian fiction by Margaret Atwood: The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), The Heart Goes Last (2015) and The Testaments (2019). Further reform is urgently needed to redress gendered power disparities; Atwood and #MeToo incite a call to action.