Bodies, Belief, and Performance: Gender and Theological Power in Parable of the Sower, The Handmaid’s Tale, and The Unworthy.

The paper reads Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale alongside Agustina Bazterrica’s Las indignas (The Unworthy). In each book, religion has a complicated relationship with gender and specifically womanhood. The first two novels are often discussed side by side in the context of the future of gender, particularly in dystopian settings. In Atwood’s Gilead, gender norms are dogmatically enforced by religious leaders. In Butler’s Earthseed, Lauren establishes a religious community where change is divine, allowing for societal roles assigned not by gender but by capacity. Newcomer to the discussion, Bazterrica’s Sacred Sisterhood offers a deeper critique of a religion’s strict gender roles, exposes a monstrous future for gender, and reinforces—more than Atwood and Butler—gender’s performative nature. The paper then reads these three works of speculative fiction to highlight how practice, theology, and ecology factor into the future of gender.