Title Pending 8735

Much of the scholarship surrounding Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake discusses trauma and gender, with emphasis on ecocritical interpretation. It is rarely discussed as a 9/11 novel, although Sutherland and Swan assert that it can indeed be read as a 9/11 text, and deal with trauma briefly amid an assortment of post-9/11 'worries.' I seek to enter the discourse addressing trauma and its cultural relationship to gender as specific causal and effectual grounds in the post-9/11 social clime. I argue that Atwood depicts the gender binary as an empty talisman ('a belief rather than a memory') used by a society in crisis to self-soothe. In this way, Oryx and Crake can be situated in relation to Susan Faludi’s understanding of the aftermath of 9/11 as part of the backlash to second-wave feminism. Oryx and Crake can be viewed as a version of the bleak future Atwood has been imagining since The Handmaid’s Tale, with capitalism instead of Christianity as the driving force and the endemic sexism portrayed more subtly. Specifically, I explore how the novel is a combination of Orwell-style government oppression and Huxley-style consumerist numbing (Kroon), concentrating on how gender interplays these dynamics. The post-apocalyptic hellscape gives the protagonist narrator a chance to reevaluate these ideals as relative and ridiculous. This relativity—asking the question: ‘what would society be like without gatekeepers, where critical thinking was the only way to function and survive?’—is the jumping-off point for a post-truth literature to emerge.