Sugar and Femininity in Early Modern Drama

甜美和女性气质在我们的语言中交织在一起。女人是‘甜心陷阱’、‘甜心’、‘甜心宝贝’；女孩是由‘糖、香料和一切美好的东西’组成的。这是人类学家明茨在《甜蜜与力量》(1985)一书中断言的极端表现，他说，无论从字面上还是比喻意义上讲，甜食都更多地属于女性而非男性。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--甜食宴会中暴露出来的情况。虽然学者们将甜蜜作为历史上与性别和性别结构联系在一起的无美感词汇来探索，但这一时期糖与女性气质之间的新兴关系并未被质疑。我认为，舞台上的宴会场景是戏剧性的十字架，其中女性和甜蜜的工作被回避。像米德尔顿和莎士比亚这样的剧作家对文化现象的激增做出了回应，这些文化现象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。这形成了一个复杂的意义网，助长了围绕女性机构、身体和任性欲望的更大的意识形态焦虑。食品史领域在最近的学术中取得了成果；文化历史学家正在研究饮食习俗的重要性，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，特别是在戏剧中的学术成果很少发表。我的研究将把女性胃口的困惑视为表演性的。这将导致对女性如何分享将食欲和食物作为其象征性语言的焦点的冲动的丰富理解。女性的欲望将被揭示为一种现象，它非但不是自然的，而且是一种文化上的构建，是自主、性和羞耻的象征。

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.