Recapture our bodies

Recapture our bodies is a slogan that appears in a documentary film screened at the Rachel and Leah Re-education Center, where Offred and the other Handmaids are shown old footage of women's liberation protests from the time before Gilead. The phrase is painted on a bedsheet banner carried by Offred's mother, who is young, earnest, and pretty in the film, wearing overall jeans and a plaid shirt, her hair tucked into a kerchief. The camera briefly captures the banner alongside others reading "FREEDOM TO CHOOSE," "EVERY BABY A WANTED BABY," and "DO YOU BELIEVE A WOMAN'S PLACE IS ON THE, KITCHEN TABLE?" — the last accompanied by a line drawing of a woman's body lying on a table with blood dripping from it. The film is part of what Aunt Lydia calls an "Unwoman documentary," intended to illustrate the supposed moral decay of the pre-Gilead era, but the slogans are not blacked out, and the Handmaids breathe in sharply at the sight of them, a stirring running through the room like wind over grass.

The Slogan's Meaning and Context

"Recapture our bodies" encapsulates the core demand of second-wave feminism for women to reclaim control over their own physical selves — their reproductive capacity, their sexuality, their freedom from violence and objectification. In the pre-Gilead world that Offred remembers, this ideal was expressed through choices about clothing, work, relationships, and bodily presentation. Offred recalls wearing shorts, jeans, and jogging pants, earning her own money, and walking freely on the same streets where she now walks in a red dress and white wings, with no man shouting obscenities or whistling. Aunt Lydia frames the change as a trade: "There is more than one kind of freedom... Freedom to and freedom from. In the days of anarchy, it was freedom to. Now you are being given freedom from." The slogan "Recapture our bodies" represents the "freedom to" that has been systematically eliminated.

The Body Under Gilead's Control

In Gilead, the female body is no longer a site of personal agency but a national resource, managed by the state for reproductive purposes. Offred's body is marked with a tattoo on her ankle — four digits and an eye, "a passport in reverse" — that guarantees she can never fade into another landscape. She is subjected to monthly medical exams, her fertility monitored and her body treated as a vessel. During the Ceremony, she lies between Serena Joy's legs while the Commander performs a perfunctory act of copulation that has nothing to do with desire or pleasure; Offred thinks, "Nor does rape cover it: nothing is going on here that I haven't signed up for." The body that was once an instrument of pleasure, transportation, or will has become a "cloud, congealed around a central object, the shape of a pear," its only purpose to conceive. Handmaids are forbidden hand lotion or face cream because the Wives do not want them to look attractive; Offred secretly uses butter to keep her skin soft, a small ceremony of hope that she will "some day get out, that we will be touched again, in love or desire."

The Irony of the Documentary

Aunt Lydia shows the documentary to condemn the women of the pre-Gilead era as "Unwomen" who wasted their time on frivolous activism, but the film has the opposite effect on Offred. Seeing her mother young and earnest, carrying a banner that demands bodily autonomy, is a painful reminder of what has been lost. The slogan "Recapture our bodies" becomes a ghostly echo of a world where women could organize, march, and demand control over their own lives — a world that Gilead has systematically dismantled. Offred later reflects on the irony: "You wanted a women's culture. Well, now there is one. It isn't what you meant, but it exists." The regime has created a society organized entirely around women's bodies, but one in which those bodies are owned, regulated, and stripped of all self-determination.

The Slogan as a Marker of Lost Freedom

For Offred, the memory of the slogan is inseparable from the memory of her mother, who was "wiry, spunky, the kind of old woman who won't let anyone butt in front of her in a supermarket line." Her mother's activism, her insistence on choice and bodily integrity, stands in stark contrast to Offred's present condition, where even the act of looking at her own naked body feels shameful and strange. Offred avoids looking down at herself "not so much because it's shameful or immodest but because I don't want to see it. I don't want to look at something that determines me so completely." The slogan "Recapture our bodies" thus marks the distance between a past in which women could imagine reclaiming their physical selves and a present in which the body has been turned into a tool of the state, its desires and choices erased.