Heresy. That’s what you get punished for, not for being part of the resistance, because officially there is no resistance.

Mayday is the name of a secret resistance group that is active in the novel and television show, The Handmaid’s Tale. The Handmaid’s Tale is set in a fictional Military Dictatorship called Gilead, which is based on oppressive regimes throughout the world.  Challenging the regime is punishable by death, and Mayday needs to operate covertly.

In this Lunchtime Talk, Dr Katy Mason will discuss forming and maintaining hope in oppressive systems, focusing on the function which resistance networks play where it feels too radical to openly offer any countercultural narrative. She will use The Handmaid’s Tale and Mayday to illustrate her ideas. Katy says that having read the book or watched the show is not a pre-requisite for joining her Lunchtime Talk.

In the television show, the main protagonist eventually meets Mayday operatives doing field work and they engage in the following dialogue:

Protagonist:

You really exist? We thought Mayday was just something we made up because we needed to.

Mayday Operative:

Then you were Mayday too.

We will think about organisations and systems where open challenge and  dialogue feel too dangerous. At what point do radical covert operations need to take over? We will use the example of Mayday in The Handmaid’s Tale to think about whether the function of an operation such as this is actually inter-psychical containment, or whether Mayday is actually an extra psychical network with practical functions. 

Katy hopes that attendees of this Lunchtime Talk will come away inspired to lead and incite underground rebellion.

Biography

Dr Katy Mason was one of the 2023 Cohort of Deepening Creative Practice in Organisations. She is both a Forensic Psychiatrist and Psychotherapist. She trained concurrently in both of these professions. She became interested in organisational dynamics as she struggled to find her place and her role amongst the projections attracted by each of these trainings. She found the arts a way to help her survive and make sense of the experience, particularly thinking about how trying to survive in both of these roles led to one or the other parts of her being silenced. 

She now works with offenders in the community and continues to be obsessed with dystopian fiction.