What the Hell? The Handmaid’s Tale in 2017
Series
Where
When
Sunday, 15 Oct 2017, 07:30pm - 09:00pm
Event Status
Past event
This may not seem ordinary to you now, but after a time it will. It will become ordinary.
We’re concluding the Festival of Questions with an evening of readings, rantings, debate and discussion inspired by The Handmaid’s Tale. Why has Margaret Atwood’s uniquely disturbing vision of feminist dystopia struck such a chord in 2017?
Does the overwhelming response to the new TV Handmaid’s Tale series reflect a moment of unprecedented panic among feminists? Or are we waking up to our complacency?
At the Melbourne Town Hall, we’ll pull apart and rebuild The Handmaid’s Tale with our panel of aunts, including Deborah Frances-White, Lauren Duca, Celeste Liddle, Quinn Eades, Jamila Rizvi and Krissy Kneen. They’ll take us through key moments of the novel and discuss the TV series’ most poignant, powerful and hands-over-the-eyes-horrific scenes.
Join us for an exploration of the surreal, the sinister and the speculative in popular culture today. BYO white-winged bonnet and paranoid outlook.
Featuring Deborah Frances-White, Lauren Duca, Krissy Kneen, Celeste Liddle, Jamila Rizvi and Quinn Eades.
All sessions of The Festival of Questions will be Auslan interpreted.
This event is produced in collaboration with The Guilty Feminist podcast. Presented in partnership with Melbourne Festival and City of Melbourne.
Featuring
Deborah Frances-White is a stand up comedian, writer, speaker and podcaster. She is best known as the creator and host of The Guilty Feminist Podcast – which has had 20 million downloads in its first 18 months. It has just been nominated for a 2017 Aria Award for Best Podcast. She is currently ... Read more
Lauren Duca is an award-winning and -losing freelance journalist best known for her viral piece ‘Donald Trump is Gaslighting America‘, and calling Tucker Carlson a ‘partisan hack’ on national television. In addition to working on her Thigh-High Politics column for Teen Vogue,... Read more
Krissy Kneen is the award-winning author of fiction, poetry and non-fiction, including An Uncertain Grace, which was shortlisted for the Stella Prize. She has written and directed broadcast television documentaries and is the current Copyright Agency Ltd Non-fiction Fellow. The Three Burials of L... Read more
Celeste Liddle is an Arrernte woman (traditional owner in Central Australia) who was born in Canberra and has been living in Melbourne since she was a teenager. She is a trade unionist, an activist, a feminist, a social commentator and an opinion writer. In May 2021, she was announced as the presele... Read more
Quinn Eades is a researcher, writer, and poet whose work lies at the nexus of feminist and queer theories of the body, autobiography, and philosophy. Eades is published nationally and internationally, and is the author of all the beginnings: a queer autobiography of the body, and Rallying. Eades is ... Read more
Jamila Rizvi is Deputy Managing Director at Nine’s Future Women. She is a best-selling author for adults and children and an opinion columnist for The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald. Jamila hosts a number of podcasts, The Weekend Briefing, Anonymous Was A Woman and The Secret Life of Carers. Sh... Read more
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