Transmedia Science Fiction and New Social Humanities

One of the crucial aspects of the “digital revolution” is an impressive mutation of communication forms and modes of cultural circulation and consumption. For some decades now, we have been witnessing a change that involves production strategies as well as the fruition, increasingly linked to networking, of literary, artistic, cinematographic, television, theatrical works and productions. The multiple mutations of the “cultural industries,” the social and cultural transformations confuse, merge and hybridize the digital and the “real”: technology, society and culture are linked by relationships of mutual co-determination and co-evolution. Within this perspective, the essay analyses The Handmaid’s Tale (the dystopian novel, the movie, the tv series) as a cultural product that intertwines literature, its translations in different cultures, the visual arts, and public engagement. The Handmaid’s Tale as a cultural product shows how the media revolution, in its diverse forms and applications affects gender equality and equity but also how the very notion of gender is re-discussed and transmitted. Issues related to women, gender, ethnicity, and class interrogate the new humanities and transmedia studies as possible spaces of empowerment or/and exclusion, empowerment or appropriation and homologation. The chosen case study implies a premise concerning both the status of science fiction (with specific reference to women authors) and a discussion on utopian and dystopian sf as genres especially capable to challenge and re-articulate the socio-cultural-political imaginary, both in the popular culture and in the academia, while, hopefully, asking for a drastic critique of the symbolic order. The remediation of The Handmaid's Tale in different media has given rise to affective communities that engage with struggles and social movements in support of women's and civil rights.