The Year of the Flood Reading Response
Right from the start, I saw that The Huger Games has a lot in common with Margret Atwood’s novel. Both focus on how advanced technology cannot save us from ourselves. We need to be protected from ourselves. We are more than capable of self-destruction and both novels demonstrate this through the dystopian lens.
I admire Toby’s strength above all. She lost her mother and buried her father. She is self-reliant and works hard to survive. She dealt with Blanco as best as she could and adjusted into life as a gardener,a lifestyle so different from what she was used to. The gardeners do not have the luxury of daily showers and are vegetarians. They all dress in the same, dull way and are compared to nuns. This could strip someone of their individuality but Toby remains who she is. To make up for not buying into their belief, she works twice as hard. This shows that she takes pride in her work and keeps importance in her actions versus what she may say or believe. In the first few pages, Ren says that she needed someone strong like Toby. To be classified as such by another who also went through the terrifying pandemic shows that Toby is a true role model.
Googling Women International
In response to Professor Brundage’s post, I decided to do the search myself and this is what I came up with. The article said that this Google search was particular to results found in America so I decided to do similar searches under Google India and Google Spain.
Searches Under Google.com:
Google India:
Google Espana:
For the first post, I searched “women need” in Spanish. The results I got were women need company, women need money, women need help and women need men.
For the second search, I looked up “women do not know” in Spanish and the top choices were, women do not know how to read maps, women do not know what they want, women do not know to drive, and women do not know to lead.
Clearly, this issue is not just limited to the US and the fact that so many of the same stereotypes and oppressive thoughts exist around the world is alarming. These searches were done in countries that are very different from the US culturally, but apparently in terms of what women should and shouldn’t do, what they can and cannot accomplish, we have come to the incorrect general consensus.
Reading Response to Atwood
Margaret Atwood has a way of creating futuristic universes in which society is fairly technologically advanced but gender norms and roles are backward. The non-egalitarian treatment of women in The Year of the Flood reminds me of the mistreatment of women in Atwood’s A Handmaid’s Tale, albeit a little less strict. In both books, men are more powerful than women, and it’s socially acceptable for men to mistreat women. Toby highlights her father’s faithfulness to and love for her mother by his dedication to caring for her in a society in which men divorced their wives, something “a lot of men did when something too debilitating and expensive struck their wives” (Atwood, 2009, 27). Men like Blanco, Toby’s boss at SecretBurgers, and Mordis, Ren’s boss at Scales and Tales, are both men who are in a charge of a workforce of women and both are in positions that involve objectifying and sexualizing their female employees; except sexual harassment and coerced sex are not a part of the SecretBurgers manager’s job description, Blanco just brings a little something extra to the table.
Side note: I was just a little repulsed at how women were equated to products. Mordis described the appeal of sleazy clubs because it “separated our brand from the run-of-the-mill product the guy could get at home, with the face cream and the white cotton panties” (Atwood, 7). So the “cleanest dirty girls in town” of Scales and Tails were the exciting and “better product”, while wives and women who wore white cotton panties were the pedestrian and inferior “product” (Atwood, 7). Pigs.
Although Toby mentioned the Gardeners’ opposition to words, I wasn’t struck by the irony of the technologically advanced, but illiterate society until 60 pages in. Writing and the printing press are two of the earliest forms of technology, and they allowed for the widespread education and learning that led to other technological advances. If not for writing and the accessibility of books after the printing press, scientists and thinkers would have had a hard time learning the foundations of their fields, which allowed them to build on top of that knowledge to make new discoveries and advances. Amanda (Toby’s friend) slowly re-acquired her ability to express herself with written language by starting with one letter and slowly adding more to create words. The world of The Year of the Flood has knowledge of gene slicing and has created rakunks and green rabbits, but people didn’t have written language. Incroyable.
Reading Response (The Year of the Flood)
Maybe I was being overzealous, but while reading Margaret Atwood’s “The Year of the Flood” I couldn’t help but draw conclusions between Atwood’s Toby and Suzanne Collins’ Katniss. Both women find themselves in a situation that isolates them and in which they must draw strength and endurance to survive in the dystopian world they inhabit. Both women have been self-sufficient because of absent parents and both know how to wield weapons because of their fathers. The existence of gender roles in both worlds are questionable at best, but both women do not concede to our modern world’s traditional role of a woman.
From a macro point of view, both Toby and Katniss find themselves in catastrophes that they are told are honorable. Toby is told by the Gardeners that survival of the waterless flood is an honor and responsibility given by God to replenish the Earth with his animals and plants. Katniss is told by the Capitol that it is an honor to fight and represent her district in the games. However, it is clear that neither situation seems favorable or pleasant. Atwood’s description of Painball is also similar to the structure of the Hunger Games because it is a place of condemnation: a place where people go to die. Painball features a fight to the death in a forest, which is screened publicly for all to watch just like the Hunger Games. Come out alive of either and the victors are numbingly changed and respected. (Although in Painball, one is respected and feared while in the Hunger Games, one is respected and celebrated).
It’s a spontaneous parallel, but I’ll continue to keep it in mind while reading devouring “The Year of the Flood”.
Reading Response 10/24
I had a really good time reading the first few chapters of Year of the Flood. I thought it was really interesting to note the balance between the futuristic and archaic aspects of the Gardeners society, a balance that’s very similar to our modern day world. When the Waterless Flood hits Atwood structures the book so that we are subconsciously comparing Ren and Tobys journeys, how they got to the Garden and what they’re doing after the flood. Both characters express their gratitude of surviving, how Toby feels like she survived for a reason and is searching for her purpose while Ren is enjoying her job at Scales and Tails. Toby was essentially rescued by the Gardeners from struggling on the streets, donating her eggs to strangers, and being raped by her boss every day at a sleazy fast food joint. Although she didn’t agree with their beliefs, she was protected and enjoyed the serenity of her life teaching holistic medicine. all this Toby was living an ordinary life. She was enrolled in college, she has a boyfriend, and a family that was comfortable and loved her, but her experiences turned her cold and hard, so that she was constantly questioning why she even survived and what her bigger purpose is. even though she didn’t agree with their beliefs, she was protected and enjoyed the serenity of her life teaching holistic medicine.
Ren on the other hand was taken from a “good” life by her mothers doing, not because she was driven by the need to survive. Ren longed for her life before joining the Gardeners and coveted the trendy clothing, the flashy jewelry, the eccentric objects that they the “pleebrats” had lifted. She longed to be part of that world, so naturally Ren would find comfort in Scales and Tails, the gentleman’s club. Ren speaks about feeling lucky to be there, to be cared for, to find family–something she was constantly looking for, since leaving her father. Ren never questioned why she was there or what she was doing, she was content with her place…her connection the outside world was through Amanda, just like it has always been ever since she was on the rooftop and Amanda was living in the streets.
It’s a very frightening thought to question what your purpose is, to feel like you were placed on this earth for a reason, spared your life for a reason, a reason that you don’t know. It’s also frightening to know that it might take a natural disaster, a near-death experience, a not so colorful future to realize that what you’re doing right now isn’t what you’re meant to be doing… that you’ve got your whole life backwards. I think Atwood does an incredible job of using this dark, kind of weird, futuristic world to teach us lessons that can be applied to our society, to our everyday lives.
Googling Women
Inspired by Cynthia’s forum post on a new UN public service campaign, I decided to try it myself. Here’s what I got. Add yours!
Syllabus Adjustments
There are a few adjustments I would like to make to the syllabus.
1) Going forward, I would like a weekly blog update from each group (one post per group–I recommend that you rotate this responsibility) on their thoughts, process, and progress for the final project. You can use this post to get feedback from me, Emily, and your classmates about your project. Tell us your insights, and discuss any stumbling blocks.
2) Along with your reading responses, you should also comment on at least two classmates’ blog posts every week.
3) General questions and discussion items should still be posted in the forum, but since we are meeting weekly going forward, we can turn our energies to blogging and commenting.
4) The wikipedia project is going to be postponed slightly. Details forthcoming!
5) Everyone should contribute to our mural on a regular basis. You have two responsibilities: charting your group’s area and contributing to the areas on major characters and events.
6) Your second reading response–a multimedia response to Year of the Flood–is due on November 14. You may do this project as a group or individually. Keep in mind that a group project should be more ambitious than an individual one! Please let me know your plans by Nov 7. Emily and I are available to consult!
Year of the Flood Project
This evening in class, we will begin our discussion of Margaret Atwood’s Year of the Flood. I have enjoyed reading the responses you have posted so far.
Tonight, Emily will also do a demonstration of Mural.ly, a collaboration tool we will use to discuss, draft, and plan your final project: a collaborative multimedia response to Year of the Flood. To complete the project, we will break down into teams:
- Chronology and Geography
- God’s Gardeners: Saints, Celebrations, and Beliefs
- Corps, Science, Technology, and Social Systems
Each group will brainstorm about possible responses and media to represent them (timelines? maps? short films? text? what else?). As you read, you should add notes about your area to our class planning mural. We’ll all add notes on major characters to the mural. In each class meeting, each team will give brief report back on their findings. We’ll use our mural help draw connections between ideas and events in the novel, and to determine the architecture and draft components of our final project site. A class wikipedia page is also available for drafting, and eventually, our class will contribute to the Year of the Flood page (and possibly more) on Wikipedia.
By next Thursday, Oct 31, your group should have an established presence on the mural, list out key elements of the novel for your area, and should make a blog post about your ideas for the final project. (One post per group is fine–within your group, you should decide how to allocate that job fairly.)
You should make updates to the mural often in the upcoming weeks. What you post there does not need to be formal; it should serve as a workspace, drafting, and note-gathering area. In class on Nov 7, we will wireframe the final project site together.
Technology Diary 3: Cigarettes
As a smoker who isn’t “trying to quit,” I do still think it’s important to challenge myself from time to time with scary facts about the tobacco industry that, if I don’t kick the habit right then and there, after learning the gruesome detail, will question my integrity and what I claim to value. And while it may be a stretch to call cigarettes technology, the historical gendering of the product, specifically the tobacco industry’s exploitation of feminist ideals, adds an interesting facet to the discourse around progress within women’s movements.
Prior to World War I, female smokers were associated with “loose sexual morality and even prostitution” (Marine-Street). Thus, the only women who appeared in tobacco advertisements during this time were depicted as eroticized objects serving cigarettes to men, not smoking them themselves. Then, during the war, the shifting social atmosphere indicated to the tobacco industry the opportunity to loop in as consumers that hefty other half of the population: women. As women moved from the domestic sphere to the public sphere, filling in for all the men fighting abroad, their newfound (relative) mobility and independence made them a perfect target for tobacco marketing.
The association between smoking cigarettes and being independent has always, been a strong one. The irony therein, of course, is that cigarettes are highly addictive and consumers can hardly argue that smoking is an autonomous act. Regardless, the tobacco industry keenly took advantage of this link during and after the war, extending its application to growing and developing feminist values of the mid 20th century. Natalie Marine-Street, in her article “Stanford Researchers’ Cigarette Ad Collection Reveals How Big Tobacco Targets Women and Adolescent Girls,” emphasizes this very point:
To vanquish remaining cultural taboos, [tobacco companies] appropriated individualist and feminist messages and presented smoking as a way for women to demonstrate their liberation from confining traditions. In an ironic echo of the giant suffrage parades of the prior decade, one enterprising company marched cigarette-smoking women in flapper-style dress down New York’s 5th Avenue. They called the cigarettes the women’s ‘torches of freedom.’ (Marine-Street)
Another point of attack that tobacco marketers used to hook women on their product was to manipulate female’s insecurities around body image. By encouraging women to “Reach for a Lucky Instead of a Sweet,” for example, they purported the idea that women could and should maintain a thin figure by smoking cigarettes (Marine-Street). This campaign has only grown over the years, despite current knowledge about the massive health risks involved in the habit. In the 1970’s, tobacco companies invented “Slims” and “Thins” as a type of cigarette to reinforce their efforts to exploit women’s ideas about beauty and their bodies. Today, we have certainly not overcome such demeaning and underhanded tactics; instead, women are now free to smoke “Superslims.”
![SuperSlims_Feminine_PinkRoses_1982[1]](https://files.eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/3923/2013/10/16003338/SuperSlims_Feminine_PinkRoses_19821.jpg)
More Tobacco Ads targeted towards Women
Works Cited
Marine-Street, Natalie. “Stanford Researchers’ Cigarette Ad Collection Reveals How Big Tobacco Targets Women and Adolescent Girls.” The Clayman Institute for Gender Research. Stanford University, 26 Apr. 2012. Web. 24 Oct. 2013.
Reading Response 10/24
For me, part of the appeal of reading dystopian fiction such as The Year of the Flood is grasping the minute details of the new and futuristic, but not really far off, world. The systems, structures, hierarchies, and even products found in these dystopian worlds all contain references to present-day “real life” world and ingrained in these usually extreme (or arguably not really) versions seems to be a warning. One aspect of the dystopian world in The Year of the Flood that intrigued me was the concept of identity especially in the context of the work of Butler, Haraway, and Halberstam we read so far. After her mother dying and her father committing suicide, Toby was straddled with the numerous debts from her mother’s medical treatments as well as having to explain her father’s death via an illegal weapon. Toby opted for covering up her father’s death/ disappearance and orchestrating her own disappearance. She was able to “burn” her identity, which is not farfetched especially if you watch way too much police procedural television shows like me (at some point, witness protection will always be bought up…). However, she was not able to “buy a new one – not even a cheap one,” which is implied entails at least a “DNA infusion,” “skin-colour change,” and etc. (Atwood, 2009, p.30).
The concept that identity can be erased and that physical procedures and products can be bought to create a new one is intriguing. In light of Haraway and Halberstam and even in our present-day world, this concept is not really radical. Literal bodily modification like plastic surgery is becoming a norm in our world. While we arguably claim that DNA and fingerprints to be the physical essence of our individual identity, what is to say that these characteristics are not also inherently unstable and can be modified. The fact that in Atwood’s dystopian world that these seemingly physical essences of individual identity can be changed for a price brings up the issue of the instability of identity (especially gender) as well the technology involved in fashioning it is bought up in pieces by Haraway and Halberstam. These products and procedures also bring up the question of whether or not if there is an essential identity (usually sans technology) can be found. Phrases like “technology of sex” and “technology of gender” have been bought up in our class, but it is possible that “technology of identity,” which is quite literal in Atwood’s dystopia, is an overarching theme to be explored.
At the same time, the concept of identity in Atwood’s world seems to be tied to knowledge, especially systematically collected knowledge. The purpose of these products and procedures to physically change one’s identity is done in the context of the CorpSeCorp’s system of controlling the population. Not far fetched from the paper trail and increasingly virtual trail in tracking people in our world, it is implied that the CorpSeCorp would have knowledge of an individual’s DNA, fingerprints, life histories, and etc., which is then utilized for control. This is implied in what is considered the greatest sin according to God’s Gardeners, which is slanted as against CorpSeCorp and its accompanying principles, is the sin of desiring too much knowledge. Likewise, a reoccurring principle the gardeners teach is to “Beware of words. Be careful what you write. Leave no trails.” (Atwood, 2009, p. 6). The notion that identity is tied with trackable and collectable (written) knowledge is implied. This idea is then played with in Amanda’s art pieces of appearing and disappearing words…
