Description
This paper traces the invisible person trope in Literary IR treatments of (women's) human rights, sexism, racism and other international law issues from Mary Shelley through H.G. Wells, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Lorraine Hansberry, Margaret Atwood and the 2020 'Invisible Man' movie starring Elisabeth Moss, a feminist icon for her portrayal of Offred in the 2017 Hulu series of Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. I show how the figure of the socially isolated "invisible (wo)man" grew from Mary Shelley's 1826 novel The Last Man and 1832 short story "The Invisible Girl," followed by the global influence of her reader H.G. Wells's 1897 novel The Invisible Man and its 1930s Universal monster movie adaptations. The image of the invisible (wo)man has come to populate both Black and feminist existentialist and dystopian literature because of its power to connote the struggles of people oppressed on the basis of race and gender to find recognition of their humanity, citizenship and other rights in and across modern societies and nation-states.
