Gender, Emotion, Literature

Abstract

Emotions and genders are culturally maintained through representations that are both historical and formal. In the areas of literary emotion studies most influenced by feminist and queer theory—and particularly in affect studies—instantiations of affect and practices of emotion are revealed to be based in cultural scripts and repetitions that are simultaneously engaged in the formation of the sex/gender system. These processes are often intertextual, so this chapter traces the ways early modern gender is constructed through emotion in a key moment in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night alongside the underlying structural models of gendered desire and bodily difference announced in Petrarch’s Rime Sparse. Tracing the ways emotion and gender are represented in these texts reveals how they intersect to define normative masculinity (and with it, femininity) and its associated emotions through enmeshed representational processes. As this case study in intertextuality reveals, gender and emotion operate through performance, repetition, and adaptation, and both define the lived experience of the self. Literature, therefore, occupies a privileged role as a site for these definitions of the gendered and emotive body in social contexts.