Corpo e disciplina: os corpos dóceis em O conto da aia, de Margaret Atwood, e Não me abandone jamais, de Kazuo Ishiguro

Abstract

This thesis investigates the novels The Handmaid's Tale, by Margaret Atwood, and Never Let Me Go, by Kazuo Ishiguro, through the relationship between body and power, a fundamental characteristic of the dystopia genre. In the two works examined, the human body is a mere object used in favour of third parties. This work hypothesizes that the disciplining of bodies is an essential strategy for the establishment and maintenance of supposedly ideal political and social systems created in fiction. For the purposes of this analysis, starting from the concept of utopia and the exemplification through the classic utopias of Plato (2000), More (2004), Campanella (2002), we address the origin and characteristics of dystopias. Next, we explore disciplinary processes through Michel Foucault's theory of docile bodies (1999a, 1999b), which results from the discipline applied to bodies to strip them of their subjectivity, making them merely functional. Finally, we analyze the novels in order to demonstrate how the processes described by Foucault transform the characters in The Handmaid's Tale into object-bodies and condition the post-human bodies of Never Let Me Go for them better achieve the purpose for which they were created, namely organ donation.