With my paper being about trauma and cross-dressing in Shakespeare plays, I am looking forward to exploring what trauma could have meant in the 16th and 17th century. It is also in my wheelhouse because I am a psychology minor and with the field being relatively new, there is probably not a whole lot written in this fashion about these heavily explored plays. I tried to assign parts of the plays that carry the most plot for the characters I am focusing on; their backstories, interactions with certain characters, and their endings. These are the important parts and also some of the parts that are the chewiest. I am looking forward to hearing how my classmates take the trauma from these characters and use that as a means to justify their actions. I am fortunate enough to be one of very few men in the class and with that being the case, I am looking forward to hearing what the women in the class have to say about these female characters. I think they will be able to provide some angles I did not consider.
I already know that people cope with trauma in many different ways. Some of these being avoidance and impersonation. These are the mechanisms used in Twelfth Night and As You Like It. I also think that there will be some other things that I come across in my research that I can then relay into my paper. I am also going to use bell hooks and her ideas about gender being performed. I think that looking at that lens and how that may relate to trauma could be cool to implement into my paper.
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