Popular Culture and Cultural Citizenship Examining Audience Understandings of The Handmaid’s Tale in Hungary

Abstract

This article, drawing on the work of Joke Hermes (2005), examines how audiences engage with popular culture in ways that forge political awareness and civic engagement against the dominant political status-quo. Through exploring twenty-two Hungarian women’s various levels of engagement with the recent television adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale (Hulu 2017–), this study aims to answer the following questions: How do Hungarian female audiences engage with topics raised in The Handmaid’s Tale series? How (much) does their engagement with the show encourage cultural citizenship? Based on the twenty-two in-depth interviews, this qualitative empirical audience research sheds light on the role of television drama series in facilitating the manifestations of cultural citizenship as a site of identity-construction and community-formation.