GILEAD MEMES, PLUCKED from the TV series The Handmaid’s Tale, have become a reactive go-­to for expressing horror and disgust at the disintegration of reproductive rights in the United States, even before Roe v Wade was revoked by the US Supreme Court on 24 June 2022. The Gilead of Margaret Atwood’s imagination, first embodied in her speculative 1985 novel, is a nightmarish vision of what a Christo-­fascist regime may look like. The startling, colour-­coded clothing to demarcate ‘types’ of women, particularly the red capes and white hoods of the handmaids, along with the horrifying state-­sanctioned violence, are what make Gilead such a powerful representation of Christo-­fascist oppression. The Handmaid’s Tale turned a largely abstract ideology – ‘Christian reconstructionism’ – into a concrete, visual ‘reality’, and therein lies its symbolic power.

The aesthetics of Hulu’s Gilead, however, also lend it an improbable, even fanciful, air. Visually, it bears too little resemblance to our current society, especially in its eschewing of social media and technology, for us to view its premise – white Christian nationalism taking over a nation’s body politic – as a genuine, real-­world ‘what if?’ Yet the threat of Christo-­fascism in the US has never been as imminent or menacing. We’ve been watching it happen for eight years: one Supreme Court appointment, one piece of legislation, one failed coup, one overturned constitutional right at a time. Where is it heading? How far will it go?