The author attends a conference on gene editing in Paris and muses on the varied scientific, professional, religious, governmental, military, corporate, and advocacy-based participants invited to formulate public policy recommendations. Where, he wonders, are the cultural perspectives that could illuminate ethical issues in all their depth and complexity?

This chapter defines a new genre of biodystopian fiction characterized by the internalization of dystopia in every cell of the subject’s body. Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story, Philip Kerr’s A Philosophical Investigation, and Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy are only a few of the recent novels that construct nightmare societies shaped by the consequences of unethical uses of genetics. These fictions portray the consequences of illegal experimentation on human subjects, designer babies, monocrop agriculture, direct-to-consumer gene editing, bioterrorism, genetically engineered pandemics, posthuman clones, and a world overrun with transgenic animals. Extrapolating from current developments in genetics, these novels contrast starkly with the optimistic prophecies of prominent scientists who suggest that advances in behavioral genetics will reduce racism, the stigmatization of people with undesirable characteristics, and other forms of discrimination.

This chapter, which considers selected Atwood texts over fifty years, focuses on sexual politics in her representations of women’s attempts to define and reclaim possession of their own bodies and identities. Within a framework that includes feminist theorists Simone de Beauvoir, Luce Irigaray, Joan Riviere, Andrea Dworkin, Susan Bordo, and Wendy Harcourt, the chapter considers the psychological and sociopolitical implications of body denigration. Signaling Atwood’s enduring motif of the disappearing female body without free will, from the early “mud poem” (1974), the chapter explores varieties of women’s self-obliteration and bodily reclamation in The Edible Woman and Lady Oracle, Gilead’s patriarchal domination over female bodies in The Handmaid’s Tale, women’s often ineffectual resistance to bodily objectification in Cat’s Eye and The Blind Assassin, and disturbing futuristic speculations on the possibility of complete possession of female bodies in Oryx and Crake and The Heart Goes Last through biotechnology and robotics.

This chapter discusses Atwood’s storytelling techniques within an international context of humorous literary production. Referencing Bakhtin and Linda Hutcheon, it explores Atwood’s extensive comic strategies, identifying and explaining them through the categories of the tall tale and the carnivalesque, multivocality, irony and satire, parody, travesty, and metatextuality. It provides detailed rhetorical analyses of examples of Atwood’s humor with quotations from her short stories and her recent novels The Blind Assassin, Oryx and Crake, The Heart Goes Last, Hag-Seed, and The Testaments, showing how Atwood the humorist, satirist, and moralist expertly reconciles the double function of literature: to amuse and to instruct.