Diverse Possibilities of Shakespeare: Teaching Twelfth Night Through a Queer Lens

This project seeks to understand the ways in which Queer Theory can be applied to secondary language arts education to enhance students' understanding of identity and gender in literature. For the purposes of this project, Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night is being used as a case study text. This project includes a thorough analysis of Twelfth Night through a queer lens, a literature review of Queer Theory and educational pedagogy, a block plan and related instructional and assessment materials, a rationale for the block plan, and project limitations and implications for future research. By analyzing scholarly texts and applying the theories within them to a detailed block plan, this project develops a methodology for secondary educators to design lessons grounded in social justice theory and educational pedagogy. This project has come to the conclusion that Queer Theory includes key components, such as a challenging of binaries and concepts of gender performance, Twelfth Night is an inherently queer text, based on the components of Queer Theory, and students in secondary language arts classrooms deserve to see themselves represented in the texts they read.