Sugar and Femininity in Early Modern Drama

早期现代戏剧中的糖分和女性气质

• 批准号: 2480021
• 金额: --
• 依托单位: University of Roehampton
• 依托单位国家: 英国
• 项目类别: Studentship
• 财政年份: 2020
• 资助国家: 英国
• 起止时间: 2020 至 无数据
• 项目状态: 未结题
• 来源: https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=studentship-2480021
• 关键词: Sugar; Femininity; Early; Modern; Drama

Sweetness and femininity are entwined in our language. Women are 'honey-traps', 'sweethearts', 'sugar-babes'; girls are made of 'sugar and spice and all things nice'. This is an extreme manifestation of theanthropologist Mintz's assertion in 'Sweetness and Power' (1985) that 'sweet things are, in both literal andfigurative senses, more the domain of women than of men'. My research will investigate the gendering ofsugar as it crystallized in the early modern period, specifically as it is exposed in an under-examinedphenomenon, the sweet banquet. While the queering of sweetness has been explored by scholars as asynaesthetic lexicon historically tied to the structures of sex and gender, the emergent relationshipbetween sugar and femininity in the period has not been interrogated. I argue that banquet sceneson-stage are dramatic crucibles in which women and sugar-work are elided. Playwrights such as Middletonand Shakespeare respond to a proliferation of cultural ephemera which conceptualised womensimultaneously in three distinct ways: as creative agents, as sweet consumables, and as voraciousconsumers of sugar. This formed a complex web of signification that fed into larger ideological anxietiessurrounding female agency, the body, and wayward appetite. The field of food history has come to fruitionin recent scholarship; cultural historians are addressing the significance of food practices as bothconstitutive and reflective of gender construction, but little scholarship has been published on itsrefractions in early modern literature, especially in the theatres. My research will interrogate thecomplexities of female appetite as performative. This will lead onto an enriched understanding of howwomen share an impulse to use appetite and food as a focus of their symbolic language. Female appetitewill be revealed as a phenomenon which, far from being natural, is a culturally codified construct, a signifierof autonomy, sexuality, and shame.

甜蜜和女性气质在我们的语言中交织在一起。女人是“蜜糖陷阱”、“甜心”、“甜心”；女孩是由“糖、香料和所有美好的东西”组成的。这是人类学家明茨（Mintz）在《甜蜜与权力》（1985）中断言的极端体现，他说：“无论是字面意义还是比喻意义上，甜蜜的东西都更多地属于女性，而不是男性。”我的研究将调查糖在现代早期结晶时的性别，特别是它在一个未被研究的现象中暴露出来，即甜蜜的宴会。虽然学者们一直在探索甜味的怪异，将其作为历史上与性和性别结构联系在一起的无审美词汇，但这一时期糖与女性气质之间的新兴关系却没有受到质疑。我认为宴会舞台上的场景是戏剧性的坩埚，女人和糖的工作被忽略了。像米德尔顿和莎士比亚这样的剧作家对文化短暂性的激增做出了回应，这些文化短暂性同时以三种不同的方式将女性概念化：作为创造性的代理人，作为甜蜜的消耗品，作为贪婪的糖消费者。这就形成了一个复杂的意义网，它将围绕女性能动性、身体和任性的食欲的更大的意识形态焦虑送入其中。在最近的学术研究中，食品史领域已经取得了成果；文化历史学家正在探讨饮食习惯的重要性，认为它既是性别建构的组成部分，也是性别建构的反映，但关于它在早期现代文学中的折射，尤其是在戏剧中，很少有学术研究发表。我的研究将探究女性食欲作为表现性的复杂性。这将使我们更深入地了解女性是如何共享一种冲动，将食欲和食物作为她们象征语言的焦点。女性的食欲将被揭示为一种现象，它远非自然，而是一种文化编纂的结构，是自主、性和羞耻的标志。