Aesthetization of gender violence: Visual analysis of the first season of The Handmaid's Tale

Abstract

The Handmaid’s Tale is a television series created by Bruce Miller, whose premise takes place in a dystopian future in which fertile women are forced to gestate. This article aims to investigate the visual representations of gender violence and the objectification of the woman’s body through its aestheticization, seeking to answer whether these representations exalt or denounce gender violence, in the first season of this series. Using a qualitative methodological approach, a semiotic and discursive analysis was carried out to understand formal and rhetorical aspects of the images within a prior contextual framework. It is concluded that the embellishment of gender violence produces an emptying of meaning that exalts and spectacularizes a distorted reality in which negative mental models of women, stereotypes, gender roles and notions of objectification of the female body are visually reproduced.