CULTIVATING COMPASSION
Literature, Tattoos and Resistance
Fiction Again” were common. Interpreting the Ink Atwood’s novel seems all the more prescient in the present mo- ment of 2025, given the overturn - ing of Roe v. Wade in June 2022, the U.S.’s plummeting birth rate, and increasing environmental and social instability. The United Nation’s International Court of Justice issued its first ever opin - ion about climate change on July 23, 2025. According to an article in The New York Times , “The unanimous opinion said that the failure of nations to take action to protect the climate system may constitute ‘an internationally wrongful act.’ It also found that protection of the environment is ‘a precondition’ for ensuring hu-
BY LAURA WRIGHT; EDITED BY CAM MACQUEEN
According to the New Dictionary of the History of Ideas : The path of resistance has been neither straight nor narrow. First adopted by the political right, and then crossing the aisle to the left, resistance is sometimes considered a means and other times an end. Its mod - ern history traces the evolution of an idea and a trans- formation in politics. The English word resistance is a derivation of “resist,” stemming from the Latin — via the French — mean- ing “to stand.” Resistance has a technical scientific meaning, the opposition offered by one body to the pressure or movement of another, as well as a later psychoanalytic one, the unconscious opposition to re- pressed memories or desires. But the Oxford English Dictionar y’s primary definition: “To stop or hinder (a moving body); to succeed in standing against; to pre - vent (a weapon, etc.) from piercing or penetrating,” has a distinct political bent. In many ways, United States history can be read through the lens of resistance as a way of understanding various political and social move- ments, ideologies, and institutions. In the spring of 2017, I taught a contemporary literature course focused on the concept of “resistance,” in large part because I am interested in the way that literary fiction – an artistic mode credited with increasing readers’ level of empathy – engages with fraught historical realities as well as offers dystopian speculation about the future. I asked how literary fiction might help us navigate and resist the troubling realities like those I was seeing at the time. I had just returned from the first Women’s March in NYC, which took place January 21, 2017, the day after Donald Trump’s first pres - idential inauguration. The march, as you might remember, was the largest single-day protest in U.S. history (a title surpassed three years later by the protests against the killing of George Floyd). Marchers wore cat-eared hats, and many carried signs decrying the misogynist rhetoric and the then-potential policies of the first Trump administra - tion. During the march, many protestors carried signs that referenced Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel, The Handmaid’s Tale , a speculative fictional narrative that imagines the east coast of the United States, called Gilead in the novel, as a Christian nationalist separatist state reeling from an environmental collapse that has led to mass infertility. Women who can bear children are forced into reproductive servitude for the wealthy elite class. The narrative’s protagonist, known only as Offred (her name after she is given to “Fred,” or Commander Water - ford, and his wife Serena Joy), navigates her limited paths to resist the injustices inflicted by the state. Atwood wrote The Handmaid’s Tale as a kind of response to the rise of the religious right in the U.S. during the 1980s, and the novel saw a resurgence of interest due to the Hulu channel’s 2017 original series based on the novel. According to Variety’s Elizabeth Wagmeister, at the time that a second season was announced, “The Handmaid’s Tale ha[d] been watched by more Hulu viewers than any other series pre- miere on the platform, considering both original and acquired series.” The narrative, written almost 40 years prior, had offered us a warning of where the U.S. could be heading. That we found ourselves increas- ingly in a space that looked shockingly similar to Atwood’s Gilead be- came a kind of uneasy reality. At the march, signs saying “Make Atwood
Tattoo & Photo By Joy Antonie, Owner, The Joy of Ink Tattoo Studio; on IG @joyofinktattoos
man rights and cited government support of fossil-fuel production as a potential violation of these principles.” Meanwhile, in the U.S., the Trump administration is doing its level best to eliminate environ- mental protections, and is rolling back the previous administration’s efforts to curb greenhouse gas emissions and incentivize clean energy production. In Atwood’s novel, infertility is the result of environmental degrada - tion and the ingestion of toxins, leaving women who can have children vulnerable to exploitation and sexual and reproductive slavery — with zero bodily autonomy. Despite her circumstances, Offred says of the rumored resistance, code named “Mayday,” that may or may not exist, “I believe in the resistance as I believe there can be no light without shadow; or, rather, no shadow unless there is also light.” She feels en- couraged after she finds a phrase carved into the floor of her closet in the room where she lives, a room that had previously held an earlier handmaid: “Nolite te bastardes carborundorum.” The words are fake Latin, a made-up phrase meant as a joke, but the intended meaning is clear: Don’t let the bastards get you down. That the phrase is a joke is also part of its strength. It’s insider code shared by women who are, in the world of the novel, not even allowed to read. But Offred can read because she lived in the before times of the novel when women were taught to read, could own property and make money, and could exist in public spaces. The women who will come after her won’t be able to read. They won’t have the comfort of the joke or the pep talk that it offers, even if resistance proves futile. They will no longer have access to the code. The novel ultimately leaves us in a place of not knowing whether Offred escapes or is sentenced to death. In the wake of the first Trump administration, women had that “No - lite te bastardes carborundorum” phrase tattooed on their bodies — Don’t let the bastards get you down. As Atwood notes in her poem “Spelling,” “A word after a word/after a word is power.” As a scholar and teacher of literature, I agree. It’s why books get banned, why au - thoritarian leaders target the press and the academics; it’s why they do things like dismantle the Department of Education. That women chose to tattoo “Nolite te bastardes carborundorum” on their bodies during this pivotal moment in history constituted an act of solidarity, resistance, and prescient cognition; much of Trump’s agenda has subsequently targeted women’s healthcare, particularly women’s access to abortion. Tattoos mark the body as text, readable
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PATHWAYS—Fall 25—11
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