Bio-Political Reading of Atwood’s Oryx and Crake

Abstract

Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake (2003) is a postapocalyptic novel set in the Maddaddam trilogy in which the "flood"—a man-made virus—has almost completely wiped out human life. Atwood uses the story of Snowman, the last human on Earth, and his struggle to survive in a difficult biological and ecological environment to attack present social, political, and economic structures, as well as traditional Western concepts of subjectivity. In this paper, the focus is mainly shed on the distribution of power in the novel. The research benefits from Foucault’s concept of “Bio politics” which mainly refers to the idea of control on the functions of a human body.