Sederi Yearbook 35

Tommi Dunderlin, «A restless play of affective infections: Gendered spherology in Love’s Labour’s Lost.» SEDERI 35 (2025): 29–50.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.34136/sederi.2025.2                                                         Download PDF

Abstract

The article examines intimate space in Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost and argues that the play spatially satirizes Petrarchan rhetoric in which women’s eyes emit light that affects and infects men. The imagery of faces, vision, and light opens a view into what Peter Sloterdijk refers to as early modernity’s arising between subjects in shared, space. The play’s blurrings of gendered space can be better understood if the male academe is perceived as a microspheric project that is influenced by the beams emitted from the women’s eyes, as per emission theory prevalent in Shakespeare’s time.

Keywords: emission theory, gendered space, microspherology, Petrarch, Shakespeare.

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