Women’s Corporeality and Slime 
in Shakespeare: Staging the 
Anthropocene
Simon C. Estók
Sungkyunkwan University, Humanities and Social Sciences Campus, 25-2 Sungkyunkwan-ro, 
Jongno-gu, Seoul 03063, South Korea
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9763-3087
estok@skku.edu
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.
Keywords: English drama / Shakespeare, William / women / misogyny / bodily 
deliquescence / vaginophobia / slime / ecocriticism
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Primerjalna književnost (Ljubljana) 47.1 (2024)
Shakespeare’s texts stage an early modern contempt for women that 
centers on bodily deliquescence, a contempt understood best through 
an interdisciplinary corporeal theory that engages with new materialist 
thinking. The misogyny of Shakespeare’s texts clearly entangles myxo-
phobia (a fear of slime) with issues of control and ecophobia. It is a 
misogyny borne out of a contempt for women’s agencies (including 
sexual), a contempt that often finds its locus in the materialities of 
the vagina. It is a misogyny complicated by the highly charged am-
bivalences and genderings of slime. The environmental implications 
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180
of this vaginophobic, myxophobic misogyny, particularly with regard 
to causes and effects on environmental crises, warrant consideration 
not only because contempt for the materiality of women’s bodies is 
at root a contempt for Nature, but because the failure to understand 
and accept women’s agency results in a kind of conflation between 
women and the environment that ultimately (and very ironically) fig-
ures women as themselves agents of climate change—agents who were 
often burned at the stake for it.
Since 1998, when I published the first article linking “Shakespeare” 
and “ecocriticism,” the field of ecocritical Shakespeares has become 
flooded with scholarship.1 For all of this, however, there is little in the 
way of scholarship linking early modern misogyny and climate. There 
are important links that need seeing.
It is clear that the early modern period pictured men and women 
very differently from each other in terms of their fluidity. Many schol-
ars have written on this matter. Gail Kern Paster shows that in “early 
modern English culture’s complex articulation of gender,” it is “the 
weaker vessel as leaky vessel” (Paster 24) that is the dominant notion. 
Paster explains that
this discourse inscribes women as leaky vessels by isolating one element of 
the female body’s material expressiveness—its production of fluids—as exces-
sive, hence either disturbing or shameful. It also characteristically links this 
liquid expressiveness to excessive verbal fluency. In both formations, the issue 
is women’s bodily self-control or, more precisely, the representation of a par-
ticular kind of uncontrol as a function of gender. (25)
Clearly one of the issues here has to do with the imagined threat of 
“uncontrolled” female agency—verbal and sexual; but there is some-
thing else going on. Drawing on a treatise published in 1601 by essayist 
Pierre Charron (one of the disciples of Montaigne), Sophie Chiari of-
fers a new materialist perspective that acknowledges the agency of non-
human materials and the significance of their interactions with human 
things. Chiari maintains that “with their vapours, humours, and fluids, 
men and women’s bodies … were comparable to small, independent 
weather systems. Human passions were liquids saturating the body and 
in need of control, a little like torrential rains threatening to flood the 
land” (Chiari 15). This is an insight with profound implications, since if 
bodies are weather systems writ small, then weather systems are bodies 
1 See Estók, “Environmental.”
Simon C. Estók:     Women’s Corporeality and Slime in Shakespeare
181
writ large. What this means is that weather systems (and, by implica-
tion, climate) are gendered.
In a monumental play such as King Lear, where strange weather takes 
center-stage, misogyny—growing, as it does, out of the vagina here—
deserves attention. Lear, disgusted almost to the point of speechless-
ness, rants about what he sees as the most dangerous thing in women:
Down from the waist they are Centaurs, 
Though women all above. 
But to the girdle do the gods inherit. 
Beneath is all the fiends’; there’s hell, there’s darkness, 
There’s the sulphurous pit, burning, scalding, 
Stench, consumption! Fie, fie, fie! Pah! pah! (4.6.121–26)
The disgust here is palpable, but the source is merely—if emphati-
cally—gestured at. Lear does not mention the vagina as such. Thomas 
Laqueur discusses “the absence of a precise nomenclature for the fe-
male genitals” (Laqueur 96) but misses the obvious point, a point not 
lost on Michel Foucault in his discussion of sodomy. For Foucault, 
there is a “tactical polyvalence” (Foucault 100) made possible by the 
lack of specificity about the term, a point Gregory Bredbeck echoes 
in claiming that the term “sodomy” is “a way to encompass a mul-
titude of sins with a minimum of signs” (Bredbeck 13). The lack 
of specificity also, however, prevents any of the “socially legitimate 
forms of visibility and intelligibility” (Cohen 169) that is enabled 
by precision and naming. Thus, for Laqueur, “the male and female 
seed cannot be imagined as sexually specific” (Laqueur 38), either in 
the body or outside of it (e.g., as menstrual blood). This is clearly a 
mistake in thinking, since the early modern period most definitely 
did define women’s bodies in terms of the very superfluity that is 
menstrual blood—a superfluity that becomes a gendered sign of pol-
lution. Menstrual blood, Paster explains, “was readily classifiable as 
superfluity or waste” (Paster 79). The “sulphurous pit,” in Lear’s rant-
ing, is precisely this thing that won’t be named, this “queynte” thing, 
as Chaucer called it (and the word “queynte” would in time become 
the word “cunt”), the vagina.
The disgust in King Lear grows not merely out of a staging of vagina 
dentate misogyny, a fear of loss of masculine control to the sexual voli-
tion of women, a fear that dates back to the ancient Greeks; rather, 
this disgust is a more profound existential worry that the materiality 
of the vagina engenders in him—a fear of envelopment, death, and 
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182
dissolution, a fear that grows out of a kind of myxophobia. Lear is 
getting on in years, is anxious to put things in order and to secure his 
place, but everything is falling apart, and at the height of it all, he rants 
about the vagina, the site and source of so much that he fears.
Shakespeare indeed offers a great many descriptions of female geni-
talia, often implicitly and in relation to the environment, or, more spe-
cifically, to the land—whence, the “loathsome pit” of Titus Andronicus 
(2.3.193),2 the “sulphurous pit” of King Lear (4.6.125), and the “cold 
valley-fountain” of Sonnet 153 (l. 4). The images are far from uniform, 
ranging from the “no thing” between a fair maid’s legs of Hamlet 
(3.2.121)—perhaps out of which derives that “indistinguished space 
of woman’s will” (King Lear 4.6.271)—to the “the dark and vicious 
place” in which Gloucester begot Edmund in King Lear (5.3.173). In 
the early modern male imagination, the vagina is a place of fluids and 
slimes that cause corruption, decay, and poisoning.
In her detailed and comprehensive Menstruation and the Female 
Body in Early Modern England, Sara Read offers an expanded discussion 
of the various links between menstruation and notions of monstrosity 
in Shakespeare’s day. Read notes that the early modern midwife Jane 
Sharp draws a linguistic parallel between the words “menstruous” and 
“monstrous” (see Sharp 215) and argues that this but the tip of a much 
larger obsession with vilifying the liquid materialities of women’s bod-
ies—materialities that center on and extend from the vagina. Lear is 
hardly peculiar in his time for conceptualizing the vagina as a place of 
stench and consumption. Indeed, for the time, it is a place of rot that 
provokes fear and disgust among men, with nothing less than biblical 
authority promoting the idea.3 It is perhaps, therefore, something of an 
understatement to claim that “there was a degree of animosity towards 
the vagina in the early modern period” (see Alberti), if King Lear is any 
example. It is an animosity borne at least in part out of a fear of slime.
Slime in Shakespeare is complicated. Slime—historically gendered—
threatens chaos. Because there is such a long history in patriarchal 
imaginations linking women’s vaginas with leakiness and slime, it is 
2 All citations of Shakespeare’s works in this study are to the 1997 Riverside edition 
(see Shakespeare in Works Cited).
3 See Isaiah 64.6 (64.5 in the original Hebrew text). There are different transla-
tions of the original, some mentioning menstrual rags, others not. The Common 
English Bible translates  as “all our righteous deeds 
are like a menstrual rag,” while The New International Version offers “all our righ-
teous acts are like filthy rags” and the King James Bible “all our righteousnesses are as 
filthy rags.” There is no mention of menstruation or blood in the Hebrew original.
Simon C. Estók:     Women’s Corporeality and Slime in Shakespeare
183
urgent to address Shakespeare’s vaginophobia within the context of 
what I have elsewhere called the slimic imagination (see Estók, “The 
Slimic”). Elizabeth Grosz discusses men’s fears of women’s fluid corpo-
reality as follows:
The representation of female sexuality as an uncontainable flow, as seepage 
associated with what is unclean, coupled with the idea of female sexuality as 
a vessel, a container, a home empty of lacking in itself but fillable from the 
outside, has enabled men to associate women with infection, with disease, 
with the idea of festering putrefaction, no longer contained simply in female 
genitals but at any or all points of the female body. (Grosz 205–206)
Here, the vagina is a place of slime, rot, and danger. Although Grosz is 
not talking in particular about the men in Shakespeare, her comments 
clearly apply in a general way. Sophie Chairi’s more nuanced discus-
sions of the particularities of Shakespeare’s stagings reveal the utter 
complexity of slime in his work: it is at different times associated with 
filth, at times with death, and at times with fertility. Chiari’s discussion 
of this widely divergent set of significations of slime within the broad 
context of “signs of wrongdoing” (Chiari 42) is compelling because of 
how it raises the sense of ambivalence toward the pollution and defile-
ment that slime embodies and toward the subsequent threats it poses.
As Robert Rawdon Wilson explains in The Hydra’s Tale: Imagining 
Disgust, generally “slime suggests something … that has degenerated. 
Slime is disgusting because it is uncertain, a phase in the dissolution 
of existence” (Wilson 64). It is a threat of degeneration whose locus 
within patriarchies has been the vagina. Reviewing misogynist tradi-
tions expressed in Swift, Milton, and Sartre, Camille Paglia describes 
the “squalid womb-world” and “mucoid swamp” of “fishy female jel-
lies” as the “road to Lear’s hell” (Paglia 94). Notwithstanding her hor-
rendous mixing of metaphors, Paglia has an important point: there is 
a long tradition associating women with slime, disgust, and corporeal 
menace and threat. The threat of degeneration that slime poses is per-
haps a part of the ecophobic vision of the return of Nature (about 
which I wrote in The Ecophobia Hypothesis). It is a “vision of a Nature 
that will finally conquer humanity, reclaim all of the world, and remain 
long after we are gone” (66).4 And it is an inevitability that we will 
4 The theme has become more and more frequent in the late twentieth and early 
twenty-first centuries. It all may seem innocent enough, a mere comment on Nature’s 
resilience—perhaps even a celebration of it. Roberto Marchesini describes “the theme 
of nature taking up the spaces abandoned by the human being, in line with the 
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eventually die and decompose and become slime.
There are indeed undoubtedly solid evolutionary reasons for myxo-
phobia; yet, myxophobia misunderstands the centrality of slime and its 
elemental importance to life —all life, including human. Kelly Hurley 
explains it thus: “the human body at [its] basic level (one imperceptible 
to the ordinary working of the senses) is a quasi-differentiated mass, 
pulsing and viscous.” (Hurley 34) Even so, slime is the apogee of an 
imagined hostile agential elementality, one that infects and kills. It is 
an elemental agency that we imbue with volition. We picture slime as 
the consummate agent of infection and rot. As entangled with eco-
phobic fears of nonhuman biological agency as it is with nonbiotic 
agencies, slime is the unrecognized elemental intruder, the border-
crosser par excellence whose space is as ambivalent as can be. “Slime,” 
Shakespearean Dan Brayton reminds us, “occupies the conceptual 
space where the human imagination begins to grasp, tentatively and 
tenuously, the materiality of life itself” (Brayton 81). Slime refuses con-
tainment, inhabiting sites of disgust and horror as readily as it does sites 
of eroticism and joy. It is no less the harbinger of life and well-being 
than of death and disease. Even its elementality is ambivalent. It is 
the imagined unpredictable and uncontainable agency, however, that 
makes slime inherently political. It is the agency of slime that produces 
fear, and given the history of sexist renderings of slime being associated 
with women, a digression into Jean-Paul Sartre’s theorizing on slime is 
very much in order here.
Sartre offers one of the few serious early theoretical investigations 
of slime, and his meditations get to the heart of slime’s ambivalence. 
Sartre maintains that slime is matter “whose materiality must on prin-
ciple remain non-meaningful” (Sartre 772). It is this principle that 
makes slime an utterly ambivalent site, and this ambivalence makes 
descriptions of the ecological transformations that took place in Chernobyl, returns in 
many videos shared on social media showing deer, badgers, wolves and bears walking 
peacefully through the city streets” (Marchesini 15). Yet, these images—like those in 
the 2007 film I Am Legend, as in the Animal Planet/Discovery Channel’s joint produc-
tion of the CGI series The Future is Wild (2003), Alan Weisman’s 2007 book The World 
Without Us, the History Channel’s Life After People (January 2008), and the National 
Geographic Channel’s Aftermath: Population Zero (March 2008)—remind us of our 
unimportance. The opening epigraph of the Weisman book is itself horrifying: “Das 
Firmament blaut ewig, und die Erde / Wird lange fest steh’n und aufblüh’n im Lenz. 
/ Du aber, Mensch, wie lange lebst denn du?” (The firmament is blue forever, and the 
Earth / Will long stand firm and bloom in spring. / But, man, how long will you live?) 
(Li-Tai-Po, Hans Bethge and Gustav Mahler, The Chinese Flute: Drinking Song of the 
Sorrow of the Earth, Das Lied von der Erde, cited by Weisman, preliminary matter).
Simon C. Estók:     Women’s Corporeality and Slime in Shakespeare
185
slime both the matter of fascination to children and matter to which 
they “show repulsion” (772). Sartre’s theoretical discussions of slime 
are unique, compelling, and informative: “Sliminess proper, consid-
ered in its isolated state,” he argues, “will appear to us harmful in prac-
tice.” (771) Slime is a threat. It threatens boundaries, and “the slimy 
appears as already the outline of a fusion of the world with myself” 
(773). It is a thoroughly ambiguous material: “immediately the slimy 
reveals itself as essentially ambiguous,” and “nothing testifies more 
clearly to its ambiguous character as a ‘substance between two states’ 
than the slowness with which the slimy melts into itself.” (774) Slime 
is a dangerous transcorporeal matter that threatens the very boundaries 
that it traverses. Hurley has explained that
Nothing illustrates the Thing-ness of matter so admirably as slime. Nor can 
anything illustrate the Thing-ness of the human body so well as its slimi-
ness, or propensity to become-slime. Slimy substances—excreta, sexual fluids, 
saliva, mucus—seep from the borders of the body, calling attention to the 
body’s gross materiality. [T. H.] Huxley’s description of protoplasm indicates 
that sliminess is the very essence of the body, and is not just exiled to its bor-
ders. Within an evolutionist narrative, human existence has its remote origins 
in the “primordial slime” from which all life was said to arise. (Hurley 4)
Seeping from the borders but not exiled to them, at the core and origin 
of the body and yet a matter of profound disgust and horror,5 slime is 
beyond our command, is not the water we so proudly control in our 
fountains and dams:6 indeed, as Sartre so colorfully puts it, “slime is the 
agony of water. It presents itself as a phenomenon in the process of be-
coming; it does not have the permanence within change that water has 
but on the contrary represents an accomplished break in a change of 
state. This fixed instability in the slimy discourages possession” (Sartre 
774). It can neither be possessed nor controlled, and, unsurprisingly, 
5 Noël Carroll argues that there is a “tendency in horror novels and stories to 
describe monsters in terms of and to associate them with filth, decay, deterioration, 
slime and so on. The monster in horror fiction, that is, is not only lethal but—and this 
is of utmost significance—also disgusting” (Carroll 22).
6 The impulse to control water’s apparent randomness and unpredictability has 
resulted in beautiful and amazingly choreographed displays—such as in the Bellagio 
Fountains of Las Vegas or the Latona Fountain in the Gardens of Versailles; but there 
is little taming of slime that inspires aesthetic awe, except, perhaps, lava lamps. The 
impulse to control water has resulted in wonders such as the Hoover Dam and the 
Three Gorges Dam (profound assaults, though they are, on the integrity of the natural 
environment); harnessing slime does not produce such wonders.
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fears about slime are entangled with sexism and misogyny—each, to 
differing degrees, obsessed with power and control.
Lear’s ranting starts to make more sense. His loss of power and 
control (to his daughters, no less) goes against all reason for him, is 
almost inexplicable—but everything must have a cause, and the cause 
here is in the unpredictability that for Lear defines women, an unpre-
dictability whose vaginal locus is a slimy place of fluids and danger. 
Slime’s capacity to conceptually shape-shift manifests powerfully in 
Shakespeare, where it signifies fertility and death, growth and decay, 
beauty and filth. Theorizing about slime is clearly not an easy matter, 
but what is surprising is how difficult it has been for people to see the 
gendering of slime. It seems so obvious.
Susanne Wedlich offers a more contemporary set of theories about 
slime than Sartre in her expansive 2019 analysis in Das Buch vom 
Schleim—translated into English as Slime: A Natural History (2021). 
Wedlich states at the very outset that in literary and scientific discus-
sions of slime, stigmatization of entire groups of people has been com-
mon and that “a long and inglorious tradition has seen women forced 
into this category—as the apparently slimier sex” (Wedlich 9). Central 
to this stigmatization is a gendered disgust that historically resembles 
Lear’s. Wedlich is clearly aware, however, of the ambivalence of this 
slimic disgust. The exploration on the topic from Martha Nussbaum’s 
Washington Post article is compelling and well worth quoting at length 
here for how it encapsulates this ambivalence:
Disgust for women’s bodily fluids is fully compatible with sexual desire. 
Indeed, it often singles out women seen as promiscuous, the repositories 
of many men’s fluids. […] As the great philosopher Adam Smith observed 
about post-coital disgust, “When we have dined, we order the covers to be 
removed.” Disgust for the female body is always tinged with anxiety, since 
the body symbolizes mortality. Disgust is often more deeply buried than 
envy and anger, but it compounds and intensifies the other negative emo-
tions. Our president [Mr. Trump] seems to be especially gripped by disgust: 
for women’s menstrual fluids, their bathroom breaks, the blood imagined 
streaming from their surgical incisions, even their flesh, if they are more 
than stick-thin. (Nussbaum)
It is odd, then, that despite their breathtaking originality, Sartre’s 
comments entirely ignore the gendering of slime. Wedlich cites Sarah 
Bakewell’s theory that “Sartre, if we can judge by the vivid descrip-
tions in his books, found sex a nightmarish process of struggling not 
to drown in slime and gloop” (Wedlich 24). Even so, Sartre’s failure to 
Simon C. Estók:     Women’s Corporeality and Slime in Shakespeare
187
understand the gendering of slime (in which he participated) has signif-
icantly hindered the very theorizing about slime he sought to promote.
Sartre’s gender “silence” has not gone unnoticed, and he has been 
called down for not only missing the chance to comment upon gender 
but for himself articulating sexist positions in his comments on slime. 
Constance Mui, for instance, argues that there is “unmistakably sexist 
language in Sartre’s discussions of the slimy and the hole, which he 
associates with the breast and the vagina, organs that are distinctively 
female” (Mui 31). Whether or not Sartre is, as Mui claims in an ad 
hominem attack, a “grumbling misogynist” (31), the language of Being 
and Nothingness is clearly damning. Hazel Barnes has put it well: “There 
can be no doubt that a full investigation of the linguistic codes in Sartre’s 
writing would reveal him to be a man comfortably ensconced in a world 
of male dominance” (Barnes 341); but Barnes—like Margery Collins 
and Christine Pierce (whose pioneering “Holes and Slime: Sexism in 
Sartre’s Psychoanalysis” made the first claim about sexist language in 
Being and Nothingness), and like Mui also—suggests that the sexist con-
tingencies of the language “are [weaknesses that are] at variance with 
the central philosophy” of the text itself (341). Barnes explains that “the 
sexism is there but is contingent, relevant to our appraisal of the writer 
but not essential to our judgment on the philosophy and its potential 
value as a support to feminism” (341). Mui similarly defends Sartrean 
philosophy as essentially antisexist (ironic because she does so at least in 
part through an ad hominem attack): “One cannot infer from the sexist 
analogies of slime and holes the claim that woman occupies an inferior 
ontological status. To do so would be to overlook the delightful irony 
in his ontology: in spite of his ill feelings toward woman, woman never-
theless prevails as a full-fledged consciousness in that ontology.” (Mui 
32, emphasis added to highlight the ad hominem comment) Yet, it is 
neither what he does in his personal life with women nor his anti-sexist 
postures in various parts of Being and Nothingness that is at issue here: 
what is at issue are his sexist comments about slime. The cherry-picking 
by scholars seeking to exonerate Sartre of sexism results in pure non-
sense. It is sham scholarship to say “X pleases me but Y—even though 
it contradicts X—is irrelevant.” To call Sartre’s sexist comments “con-
tingencies of language” is to miss the point entirely, rather like saying 
that rape and clitorectomies are contingencies of culture. Sadly, this 
kind of exoneration is what Sartre apologists argue for. Better to get 
on with it. Better to acknowledge that he clearly wants to support a 
feminist position but is equally clearly unable to do so. Slime “is like a 
leech sucking me” (Sartre 773), Sartre explains, adding that “it is a soft, 
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yielding action, a moist and feminine sucking” (776). Woman as leech? 
This is sexism enough, but he goes on. Having associated slime with 
“feminine sucking,” he then associates it with “the possessed … dog” 
(776), “a poisonous possession” (776), a “snare” (776), “a sickly-sweet 
feminine revenge” (777), and a “sugary death” (777). Implicitly, these 
are all a part of the feminine sucking that slime is for him. The images 
Sartre uses in association with women—feminine sucking, possessed 
dog, revenge, and death—are deeply misogynistic. Perhaps it is possible 
to write off Lear’s vaginophobia, just as it is possible to dismiss Sartre’s 
sexism, as a contingency, but both actions are counter-productive and 
are clearly not in the interests of feminism—or the environment.
To fully understand the environmental implications of a slime-based 
sexism (or a myxophobic misogyny), understanding the long-history 
of slime’s gendering (culminating in a giant such as Jean-Paul Sartre) 
is necessary, as is understanding the notion that bodies are weather 
systems writ small and that weather systems are bodies writ large; 
however, these understandings are not enough in themselves. What is 
required are analyses that bring slime into real discussions about the 
origins of our current environmental crises and of the realities that we 
have come to identify as the Anthropocene. Relatively speaking, slime 
has not been a focus of discussion in the Environmental Humanities. 
As Anthony Camara noted in 2014, the “topic has received virtually no 
attention from scholars outside of specialists in the field of mycology” 
(Camara 9). The observation still largely holds. To bring slime into real 
Anthropocene discussions, it is necessary to understand our resistances 
slime, for “as repellent as we find slime today, it has played a signifi-
cant part in the history of science as the presumed link between the 
inanimate matter and life on Earth” (Wedlich 105). Slime is essential 
to everything living and to the decomposition that happens after life. 
Slime may very well be more a part of women’s reality than men’s, but 
the misogyny and ecophobia that this feeds7 requires sustained analy-
sis. For the most part, slime has not been a part of happy imaginings 
of nature. The propensity to imagine and stage a vengeful, hostile, and 
consummately gendered nature indeed reaches a weird crescendo with 
slime, and slime becomes inseparable from this agential elementality 
that is imagined at core as being antagonistic and deadly. Yet, slime is, 
in fact, utterly indifferent—and gender-neutral.
7 Greta Gaard usefully discusses this fear of sexuality (erotophobia) in relation to 
sexism, heterosexism, and homophobia as well as in relation to ecophobia: “eroto-
phobia is … a component of ecophobia” (Gaard, “New” 650); “ecophobia and eroto-
phobia are intertwined concepts.” (Gaard, “Green” 1)
Simon C. Estók:     Women’s Corporeality and Slime in Shakespeare
189
Misogyny was in full bloom in the early modern period, as it was in 
Sartre’s day and as it is perhaps indeed in our own, but the weather clearly 
didn’t help things in the period of the Little Ice Age. The “misogynistic 
paranoia that fueled the European witch-hunts” (Paster 248) intensified 
under the skies of the period, and the articulations about links between 
witches and inclement weather were well pronounced. Macbeth’s witches 
and their hurley-burley, their thunder, lightning, rain, and gloomy skies 
are but the tip of the ice-berg.8 The threat of degeneration, dissolution, 
and disorder embodied in the witches is part of a larger misogynistic 
imagination in which all women are threats of degeneration and dissolu-
tion, of a return to a feared and loathed nature. It is through the vagina 
of Shakespeare that the entanglements between misogyny and climate 
crises take form, finding expression through a staging of myxophobia 
and ecophobia that leaves a monarch dissolving into incoherence and an 
age descending into an unprecedented genocide against women.
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Ženska telesnost in koncept sluzi pri Shakespearu: 
uprizarjanje antropocena
Ključne besede: angleška dramatika / Shakespeare, William / ženske / mizoginija / telesna 
odvratnost / vaginofobija / sluz / ekokritištvo
Prepletenost okolja, mizoginije in sluzi v Shakespearjevem delu in času tako 
rekoč napove antropocen. Razumeti to uprizarjanje pomeni najprej razumeti 
osnovne teorije o sluzi. Med redkimi teorijami o tem so trditve, da gre za snov, 
ki sega čez meje, se izmika sestavni čistosti, zbuja strah in gnus; to je snov, ki 
navdaja z grozo razkroja, čeprav ima obenem temeljno vlogo pri nastanku in 
kontinuiteti življenja. Osrednje spoznanje nove materialistične teorije temelji 
na delovanju ne-človeškega, pri čemer deluje sluz na načine, ki povzročajo 
različne vrste strahu. Zanimiva spoznanja Jean-Paula Sartra postanejo še bolj 
dragocena v trenutku, ko to sluz teoretizira, ji pri tem določi spol in jo pre-
poji z lastnimi strahovi in svojo različico mizoginije. Da bi doumeli, kako 
bistvena je sluz za oblikovanje teorij o mizoginiji in ekofobiji, moramo takšno 
uprizarjanje videti kot seksistično, namesto da bi bili Sartrovi apologeti. Naj-
primernejša vstopna točka za te teme pri obravnavi zgodnjega novega veka je 
uprizarjanje vaginofobije.
1.01 Izvirni znanstveni članek / Original scientific article
UDK 821.111.09-2Shakespeare W.:305-055.2
DOI: https://doi.org/10.3986/pkn.v47.i1.11