Staging Disgust

This Element turns to the stage to ask a simple question about gender and affect: what causes the shame of the early modern rape victim? Beneath honour codes and problematic assumptions about consent the answer lies in affect disgust. It explores both the textual performance of affect how literary language works to evoke emotions and the ways disgust can work in theatrical performance. Here Shakespeare''s poem The Rape of Lucrece is the classic paradigm of sexual pollution and shame where disgust''s irrational logic of contamination leaves the raped wife in a permanent state of uncleanness that spreads from body to soul. Staging Disgust offers alternatives to this depressing trajectory: Middleton''s Women Beware Women and Shakespeare''s Titus Andronicus perform disgust with a difference deploying the audience''s revulsion to challenge the assumption that a raped woman should naturally feel intolerable shame.