In a dystopian theocracy, The Testaments (2019) by Margaret Atwood is a follow-up to The Handmaid Tale. There has been little research on how patriarchal technologies like rituals, uniforms, registries, and medico-legal protocols are the socio-technical structures that govern biopolitics. This gap frames the present study, which seeks to analyze how Atwood depicts patriarchal technologies and to examine what forms of feminist agency emerge from within these systems. The study has a qualitative, interpretive methodology that relies on a close reading of The Testaments. Data collection is based on the primary text and peer-reviewed articles. Its analysis is informed by theory-based thematic coding that corresponds to the feminist technoscience and cyborg feminism developed by Haraway as well as panopticism and his concept of biopolitics (1978). Results indicate that patriarchal technologies in Gilead punish subjects with objects of daily life, but that the same infrastructures are ironically redesigned to become instruments of rebellion, especially in the hands of Aunt Lydia, Agnes, and Nicole. The study adds an infrastructural feminist reading that redefines artefacts as technologies of governance, to add value to Atwood scholarship and to feminist theory and surveillance studies as a whole. The study suggests that more comparative work should be done on the novel in relation to other contemporary novels. By emphasizing the multidisciplinary nature in which domination and resistance are co-produced, the study highlights the importance of literature in theorizing gender, technology, and power.
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