Women’s Corporeality and Slime in Shakespeare: Staging the Anthropocene

The entanglements of environment, misogyny, and fear of slime in Shakespeare’s text and time effectively foreshadow the Anthropocene. To understand this staging, it is necessary first to understand basic theories about slime. Amidst the dearth of such theories are proclamations that it is a transgressive, element-defying matter that generates fear and disgust, matter that threatens degeneration and dissolution even as it remains fundamental to the origin and continuity of life. A central insight of the new materialist theory concerns the agency of nonhuman things, and slime exhibits such agency in ways that evoke various kinds of fear. Jean-Paul Sartre offers interesting insights that become all the more valuable when—in the moment of theorizing slime—he genders it and imbues it with his fears and his version of misogyny. It is necessary to look at this sexist rendering rather than act as a Sartre apologist because so doing helps us to understand how slime is elemental to theorizing about both misogyny and ecophobia. In discussing the early modern period, the most convenient point of entry to these topics is the staging of vaginophobia.