Julie Rak holds the Henry Marshall Tory Chair in the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. Her latest book is False Summit: Gender in Mountaineering Nonfiction (2021). She has written extensively on nonfiction, including Boom! Manufacturing Memoir for the Popular Market (2013) and Negotiated Memory: Doukhobor Autobiographical Discourse (2004). Her latest edited collection is the Identities volume of the Oxford Encyclopedia of Literary Theory (2022), and with Sonia Boon, Candida Rifkind, and Laurie McNeill the forthcoming textbook The Routledge Introduction to Auto/biography in Canada (2022).
Article: Margaret Atwood and Sexual Assault
Abstract
Margaret Atwood is routinely described as a feminist writer, whose novel The Handmaid’s Tale is a feminist dystopian classic. Her sequel, The Testaments, appeared in 2019 to a rapturous reception as another feminist text. But from the fall of 2016 until 2018, Atwood was at the centre of a controversy in Canada that presented a much more complex picture of her as a feminist, particularly with regards to her view of sexual assault. This essay examines Atwood’s interviews, social media posts, essays and fiction to examine what her understanding and portrayal of sexual assault involves, and what kind of feminist she might be. The goal is to see whether or not representations of sexual assault in Atwood’s fiction can be understood as feminist in their portrayals of consent, of testimony and even how sexual assault itself is defined.
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